


You Feel Just Like The Sun

by lady_ragnell



Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Magic, Multi, Mutual Pining, Polyamory, Post-Canon, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-24
Updated: 2021-02-24
Packaged: 2021-03-15 08:53:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 44,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29681457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lady_ragnell/pseuds/lady_ragnell
Summary: In the last days of their journey, Phi sees Quil's wild magic go even stranger than usual. It seems like it should fix itself when the world is saved, but instead, as they go to Phi's home, reunite with their families, and try to build a new life, the magic keeps misbehaving.She's starting to understand why, but she doesn't want to get her hopes up.
Relationships: Player Character/Non-Player Character(s)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 14
Collections: The Campaign of Five Dragons





	You Feel Just Like The Sun

**Author's Note:**

> **Warnings:** brief mentions and depictions of violence, various injuries, references to past character death and child abuse, and the various other traumas that characters are trying to recover from
> 
> So, towards the end of the canon, the DM got bored with the regular wild magic surge table and provided a new one, and after some curation, Quil's surges got a lot more variety. We joked, post-canon, that clearly this expansion was because she had a crush. Almost 50k later ...
> 
> Title from "The Light" by Sara Bareilles.

Most days, Phi meets Quil at the ship’s rail in the morning, when the sailors on the night shift are yawning their way to their hammocks and the rest are eating in the galley, arguing over who is taking which post for the day, drinking weaker coffee the farther they get from any ports that have any to sell them. It’s nothing they’ve agreed on, but Phi misses Quil when she sleeps in, and only stays away when she’s offered to take a night shift.

Quil is the easiest to spend time with, on this voyage that has them all chafing with the delay. Kithri is withdrawn, her flask never far from her hand, and she keeps to Keene’s company more than anyone else’s. She is a little better after her trip to Elysium, but there are still months in Lolth’s domain that she won’t speak of, except to say they need to get Arfil back. Valira moves like a sleepwalker across the ship and talks more to the seagulls than anyone else. One day, early on, Phi lost track of her for a whole day and only realized where she’d been when she climbed gasping out of the frigid water near sunset, her wild shape running out while she was still swimming. Now Phi pays attention to birds that fly over the rail, porpoises and small whales that swim at the _Jeno_ ’s side for hours at a time, when Valira isn’t anywhere else. Phi doesn’t have the words to help either of them, Kithri’s trauma and Valira’s grief for herself and for a man none of them even liked much. She stands at their sides when they let her, listens when they speak, and speaks when they listen, even if it's only about the weather.

But Quil is easier. She and Phi understand each other well by now—too well, sometimes. It could be that Quil isn’t comfortable with everything Phi knows about her, after the Tower of the Cerulean Sky, and Phi showed them all her raw and aching heart when they fought Crestmaker and his impossible army of mercenaries. But their companionship is a little easier than that of the others.

Their mornings together have become the center of Phi's days, in the month and more they've been crossing the world.

Today, she finds Quil looking longingly south with a cloak clutched tight around her shoulders. The mornings are getting colder and colder the farther they travel, and Phi can chart them by Quil's increasing displeasure, and by the increasing laziness of the bees that still buzz around her, so far from any flowers Phi can see.

(No matter how far gone Valira is, Phi suspects that she coaxes flowers from the air for Quil's beloved companions, who have no stores of honey. It's a relief to know that.)

"Missing the sun?" Phi inquires when she gets close enough, offering Quil the extra mug of tea she brewed when getting her own breakfast from the galley.

Quil scowls into the distance. "I miss sun that does anything. It's a mockery, watching it come up and do nothing at all."

"Doesn't it snow in the winters where you grew up?" It must. Tyne isn't so large that the south and north have that much difference in climate.

That brings the focus of Quil's scowl to Phi. "Of course it does. But I had a cottage there, and there was insulation. And not all these sea winds."

Phi thinks of Fairpoint Hold's stone walls, and Len's tea and quilts, the warmth all that stone never offered when she was young. "Next time we go ashore, we should invest in some furs. The Boreal Valley is cold enough to have snow all year from what Keene's told us, and we'll be able to use the warmth."

"Do we have the funds?"

"We'll have to," says Phi with a shrug. None of them have much money, when they spend nearly everything they can earn making sure the ship is running and the crew fed and paid, when they've been at their beck and call for so long. But if she needs to spend some of the emergency funds Gari gave her when she left to keep herself and her friends warm, it's money well spent.

Quil goes back to looking home. "My mother and sister don't even know I'm this far away. I've told them I'm traveling, but how could I tell them I'm crossing half the world? I just told them it was going to be hard to write for a while. They don't … they don't even know about the dragons."

Phi understands protecting people. She writes Terry more than she writes anyone at home, but she wouldn't tell Eddie or Ifan about her worst days. She had to tell Gari about Crestmaker, but she doesn't relish sharing the bad news. She says as much as she can to Terry, when she can, because she's made that promise to him, not to carry everything herself, and because he's not alone to hear it. But she knows it hurts him, hurts everyone who hears it, and can't blame Quil for keeping it to herself, when she already thinks she brings nothing but hurt to people. "You're missing them?"

"Always." Quil shivers a little and pulls the cloak more. "We're going so far away, and I'm still not any closer to helping Cordelia."

There are things Phi still can't talk about, the reasons her hands shook for days after Crestmaker was dead at her hand. She trusts Quil and Valira and Kithri as much as she trusts any of her brothers, and they might understand pieces of it. Quil will understand wanting to protect siblings, and Valira will understand that protection comes at a cost. Kithri knows better than any of them that it doesn't take a monster to cause unspeakable harm. This, though. She knows this, and she can try to talk about it. "You're protecting her. Maybe you aren't doing what you'd like to, but it's enough. Save the world, and then you can save her. We're all with you."

And, because Quil is still cold, and unhappy, Phi shrugs off her own cloak and drapes it over Quil's shoulders, hiding her smile at the way it drapes to the deck of the ship.

Quil looks over at her, sharp and startled and already starting to say that Phi shouldn't be giving up her cloak for her, and Phi shakes her head, smiles. Quil takes a sharp breath, and there's the smell of ozone that Phi has come to realize means her magic has escaped her grasp.

Whatever happened, Phi can't see the results, but Quil stares at her for several seconds, her brows pulling together in a puzzled frown.

"All well?" Phi asks, puzzled in her turn.

"Of course," says Quil, too bright, and asks about her latest letter to Terry.

*

It's instinct for Phi to put herself between the people she loves and harm. It's training for her to protect those with more arcane power than strength, a part of the strategy she learned.

The combination means that she doesn't have to think before putting herself between Quil and one of Sulyvahn's swords. Her armor buckles under the weight of the blow and her shoulder creaks with the strain, but she doesn't bleed, not like Quil would have.

Quil moves her hands, throws a spell with brutal effect on Sulyvahn, and Phi smells ozone an instant before wings of flame erupt from Quil's back, making her gasp. But Quil doesn't burn, and neither does Phi. It's not a strangely shaped Fireball, but something else entirely.

Phi kills him in the end, and wonders, a little wry, if she's to make a habit of killing tyrants, and if it bodes well for their fight against Seath. Kithri marshals them all into a line to heal them, and Valira leans, her hands on her knees, breathing through the post-battle adrenaline.

Quil stands a little farther from the rest of them as the wings dissolve into sparks and smoke, wringing her hands a little as she waits. When she catches Phi looking, she musters up something like a smile. "You should keep the swords. Not much could stand against you with those in your hands."

They're horrible and huge, impractical and a matched set. Few could usefully lift them, let alone wield them in battle, and Phi could easily leave them in the throne room as a memory and a warning. But they have a dragon to fight, and are casting their lots against a goddess. She nods and goes to unbuckle the sheathes from his sword belt.

She bristles with weapons, these days, and rarely walks through a town without the accompanying jingle of her plate. Phi misses softness and comfort, the knowledge that someone else is on guard, clothes in bright colors and soft fabrics.

Quil puts her hand on Phi's back as she cleans the swords, adding the help of Prestidigitation to speed the process along, when there's chaos in the streets and they need to let people know what's changed.

Prestidigitation isn't much magic, isn't enough to set off a surge most days, but Quil must be exhausted, because there's the extra sense of magic again, and a breeze that Phi can't feel even though they're touching is ruffling Quil's hair and robe, and Quil is staring off into the distance in the way that Phi has learned means she's hiding a blush, so Phi doesn't mention it.

*

Phi catalogs the habits and weaknesses of her friends as much as those of her enemies. It's not something she means to do, but it's not something she can stop doing either. If she knows the people she cares about, their favorite weapons and spells to cast, the old wounds that might pull at an inopportune moment, she can help them.

She knows that sometimes Tyler's left ankle stiffens up and won't let him move as fast as he needs to. She sees the way Valira pulls her blows, just a little, if she thinks she might give the death stroke to something more person than monster. She knows how many of her brothers fight as if they're alone, the way Gari's cleverness means her blows hit well but not as fast as they should, Kithri's aches and how they slow her down.

And she knows Quil's surges. She knows the paths Quil's magic likes to follow—the ones that bring fire, but also that make her float, that summon unicorns and other things to her. She sees them in fights, and she listens when Quil talks about ones she hasn’t seen. Wild magic is unpredictable by its very nature, but Phi knows the patterns, has seen Quil grit her teeth against anger or embarrassment or pain too many times not to know the ways her magic twists.

In the last months of their journey, she watches them change. Quil’s magic surges from her control more than before, which may have to do with their journey to the Demon Web Pits to rescue Arfil, or with how close they are to their goal, or simply because these days Quil is brimming with magic that seems almost to hum in the air around her and it has to jump out somehow.

Now, when the flames come, sometimes they don’t hurt. They make her hair a burning halo, or they trace along her arms like veins. They lend force to the fire she casts on purpose so it sears blue. And other times, she casts a spell Phi knows she doesn’t know, or her hair grows too fast, or one of a hundred other things happens, none of them predictable, none of what Phi has taken such great care to learn.

In camp one night while they wait for the cannon to be finished, Phi and Quil set up a game of target practice, Phi’s daggers for Quil’s Fire Bolts and Scorching Rays, and Phi laughs with delight at a particularly showy shot and on Quil’s next one, there’s the prickle of extra magic in the air, and then a humming kind of music like wind chimes in the air all around her.

It makes Valira, sitting and mending a tear in her pack by the fire, laugh, and Quil ducks her head.

Phi lowers her voice and elbows her gently. “Your surges—you don’t have to tell me, but they seem to be changing lately. And getting more frequent. As far as I know, there aren’t dragons around, or demons bargaining with you. Has something happened?”

“Nothing is wrong,” says Quil, too hasty to be anything but a lie.

If she’s lying, though, it means she doesn’t want to trust Phi with this, and Phi won’t press. Not unless there comes a time when Quil seems to be endangered by the changes. “If you’re sure. But if you ever want help—I may not know much about magic, but we have Arfil back now, or we can Send to Idilus. One of them may be able to help.”

Quil is shaking her head before Phi can even finish the sentence, anxious and embarrassed and the last of the music fading away from around them. “No, it’s nothing to worry about. Just—so much more power all of a sudden making things change, I think.”

It’s been one of Phi’s theories, the most comforting one, and that Quil throws it at her like a sop when she’s desperate to change the subject reveals it immediately as an untruth. Everything else is worse, and Phi wants so much to protect her, but she’s not a mage, and she won’t force help on Quil that Quil doesn’t ask for unless it gets worse. “Tell me if that changes. Arfil and Idilus are both fond of you. They’d be glad to help.”

“I know. It means a great deal, Phi, it really does.” Quil’s smile is brave and false, and Kithri is watching, pulled out of her reverie.

“It’s the least I could do,” Phi promises, and puts on a false smile of her own. “But maybe we should stop target practice for the night.”

“I suppose we should,” says Quil, and retreats to the light of the fire.

*

The fight against Seath and Lolth is a blur of terror and determination, but one moment sticks in Phi’s mind.

Phi is close to Seath, Haste making her movements faster and more brutal than usual, Sulyvahn’s terrible sword flashing through the air, and knows that she’s leaving her companions vulnerable. But Quil is up, she knows, because she hears Quil shout “Phi, stand clear!” and she ducks and rolls in time for the sky to fall.

Seath is battered with flaming rocks, tearing holes in the already damaged tissue of his wings, caving in part of his massive ribcage, and he’s already turning to Quil, to hurt the one who did this to him, and Phi turns too, to see Quil shining with bright light that makes Phi squint to see through it. The light doesn’t seem to be hurting her, but it’s making their allies stumble away from her, shaking off the blindness.

Somehow, through it, Phi can see Quil looking at her, proud and anxious and terrified, and Phi’s heart is in her throat, but there’s no time for that, not with Seath focused on all that light, not while her sword is still in her hands. Haste makes the world move slower around her, and Phi surges back to her feet and puts her back to Quil, puts herself between her and Seath, and the battle continues.

*

After, when the sea is boiling up around Seath’s corpse, when the poison of Lolth’s material form is dissipating into the air, Phi drops to her knees in the dirt. She’s almost used to Haste now, but she’ll never be used to the feeling of it draining out of her, leaving her weak and wavering until she can catch her breath.

Around her, chaos is erupting, the immediate relief that feels almost like panic, like there’s a catch they haven’t found yet. On the _Jeno_ ’s deck, where it’s moored not far away, Lauren is shouting orders as they handle the swell of waves from the unrest and Keene is doing something about the cannon. Shulva is turning to the mammoth riders, checking on his people’s injuries, booming out his worries much like Kithri is doing for Arfil and Solomon, who both took damage in the edges of Seath’s poison breath, Idilus having been lucky when picking his position. Valira is standing stock still in the middle of the destroyed island, staring up at the sky, dust whipping in the wind that seems to surround only her, and Phi should ask what’s going on, if there’s another threat, but it’s hard to stand.

Quil stumbles over to her and half sits and half falls next to her, and doesn’t even bother to stay sitting for more than a second, just falls on her back. “Are you okay?” she asks. “You were closest for most of it, and Kithri is healing everyone.”

Phi’s armor and her arm beneath it are etched with acid, her left leg is bleeding sluggishly, and she’ll be bright with bruises for days if Kithri needs to be sparing with her healing magic, but she’s better than she has any right to be. Quil, when she looks, is a little acid-bathed herself, a small nick just below one of her horns bleeding as head wounds always do, and she’s resting one hand gingerly on her side like there’s an injury there she’s being careful of. It’s all much better than they have any right to expect. “Nothing urgent, though I’ll want some healing at some point. Valira should be able to help, if Kithri runs low on magic. You?”

“Got a Mass Cure Wounds, and I could probably use another, but nothing too bad.”

“You were a very visible target for a while there.” Phi hesitates, but she’s too tired to avoid subjects, too tired to overthink her words. She’ll be joyful later, think of the future later. For now, all she has is exhaustion. “That was a new one, I think.”

Quil, for her part, is apparently too exhausted to lie or deflect. “Not one I’ve experienced before, no.”

“I think Arfil intends to go with Idilus wherever he goes, but you could ask one of them why things are changing, before they go.” What do they do, after a battle to save the world? Do they stay where it happened for hours or days, or all return to their own lives abruptly? Phi has helped to save her own world before, and still doesn’t have a satisfying answer for the question. She’ll see all these people again, but these first hours will be strange ones.

Quil shakes her head. “I know what’s happening, and there’s nothing to be done about it. Just a price of the strangeness of my magic.”

Phi frowns, but if there’s a time to push, this isn’t it. “I’ll listen, if you ever decide you want to tell me.”

“I know. You always do.” Quil reaches out and squeezes her arm gently, grimacing with the movement as she does. Phi really will have to pull her over to Kithri for more healing soon. “The threat is over. I have time to get mastery of it. And to do everything else I need to do.”

Tyne is without a king, and perhaps even without a castle for a king to live in. Seath has been king so long that there’s no knowing who the heir is, who has the best right to rule. Gari will know. Or Gari will know who doesn’t have a right but would be best at it anyway. But Phi is thinking of the smaller tasks left undone more than that. Of Quil’s sister, her mystery still unsolved. Of Valira and her demon. “As long as you’re sure.”

“What do we do now?” Quil asks, closing her eyes against the sun. It’s still, impossibly, barely past midday. The culmination of a year, and it was a fierce battle, but once Seath arrived, it was hardly a quarter of an hour.

Phi twists to look at her better, neck complaining in a way that means she’ll definitely feel worse after a night’s sleep than she does now, healing or no healing. Quil is beautiful, a fact that always strikes her in odd moments: when she’s scowling her way deeper into furs that Phi bought her to avoid the Boreal Valley’s constant cold, when she’s laughing into her hand as Valira earnestly lies to someone who’s annoyed her, when she’s facing down Lolth’s handmaiden without a trace of fear. Now, exhausted but bone-deep content, hurt and smiling brighter than she has in a year, she’s the kind of lovely that could be terrifying. That _is_ terrifying.

“I don’t know. Rest, I hope. Save Cordelia.” Quil’s eyes fly open, full of hope and surprise. “I promised you, didn’t I? I keep my promises. But I want to go home, too.”

“I’d like to see Fairpoint Hold,” Quil offers. “You said there are books, that some of your brothers might know something that would help. It would be a start.” She blinks, and her next words ring false. “And I’d like to meet Terry, after you talking about him so much.”

Terry, and his steady kindness and his crooked smile and his sense of fun. Phi has only let herself miss him in moments, for the past year, but now that Quil has said his name, now that it’s a possibility, it’s an ache that makes her wish she could swim to Tyne right now. “He’ll love you,” Phi assures her. “They all will.”

Quil bites her lip, on the edge of something, but Kithri calls over to them, sharp and worried, and Valira is moving in their direction, leaning heavily on her staff but grinning, and they lose track of the conversation.

*

It takes nearly three weeks to get back to Fairpoint Hold, in the end, and Phi is wild with impatience by the last days of travel. In the first days, as their other companions left them in smaller groups, she kept hold of herself well. She saw off Shulva and the mountain warriors and their mammoths and Solomon as they crossed Solomon’s Teleportation Circle back to Norene from Lordren’s island. She left Lauren and Keene and the rest of the crew in Hylene when they reached port, with promises to stay in touch. By the week’s travel to the ruined castle, she was restless and resentful of the delay, and then sad on top of it when they left Arfil and Idilus, as two wizards of repute, to control some of the chaos at the castle.

For the last six days, as they speed across the countryside from the castle to the border, Phi is glad that there are only three companions with her, the ones who have seen the worst of her and don’t mind her nerves, her impatience, now that home and family are so close.

They’re all taking the end of their quest in their own ways. Kithri has promised to escort them and stay a day or two before traveling on the extra few days to her lady’s home. She’s grimly satisfied, knowing she has no cause to fear Lolth again, and only reaches for her flask to share it between them at the fires in the evening. Valira is all but overwhelmed with shocked joy at the demon leaving her of its own choice and twice has taken off into the air as a hawk to wheel through the sky with happiness.

Quil is quieter than usual, and she peers at the scenery on either side of the road like she’s never seen it before. “The last time we were in Tyne, we were being held captive by Seath,” she explains when she catches Phi looking. “It’s been a year since we were really here. I missed home.”

Phi can’t blame her for that, even if it surprises her to think of all of Tyne as a home, when the scenery they pass is familiar but uninspiring, only a way to return to her true home. But Quil, like Valira, has had an unsettled past, and she picked her life in the woods out of worries over her own power, not because she has any great love for being alone. Maybe that makes it easier to see all of Tyne as her home. “I can’t wait for you to see Fairpoint Hold,” she says. It seems safe enough, even if it still seems like an unexpected miracle that Quil is coming with her, not running right back to Cordelia as she would have every right to do.

Quil bites her lip and frowns, anxious. “I know you’ve invited us, but I know … you and your brothers, you’re all so close. Will they even want us there?”

Anyone else, Phi might take offense that anyone would think so poorly of her family, but Quil is asking because she fears she’s not worthy, not because she thinks Phi’s brothers are unkind. “We aren’t insular. It’s hard to trust people, but Terry is accepted, and so is Kal. I vouch for the three of you, so they’ll take you in and accept you.”

“But I’m not Terry or Kal,” says Quil, ducking her head. “I’m not … with anyone.”

“Terry was Lanra’s friend before he was anything to me. And Kal was my friend before he met Iain.” When Phi glances over her shoulder, Kithri and Valira are looking away in a way that suggests they’ve been hanging off her words. “They’ll love you,” she says to all of them, but especially to Quil. And then, because Quil looks unsure and Phi isn’t given to speaking of love so frankly but she’ll do it for them, for her: “They’ll love you because they know I love you.”

It’s always hard to tell when Quil is blushing, but Phi thinks she is now, and knows that she must be as well, from the heat in her cheeks at giving too much honesty. “Thank you,” says Quil, and turns abruptly away to ask Valira a question.

Under the fresh smell of the wind and the grass, Phi thinks she catches a hint of ozone, though as far as she knows, Quil hasn’t cast a spell at all.

*

Valira has been flying above them for miles, soaring on the air currents, when she comes crashing to the ground with as little grace as Phi has seen from her. “What’s wrong?” Phi asks, reaching for her sword without thinking.

“We’re close to the hold, aren’t we?” Valira asks, as though she doesn’t know.

“Within a day,” Phi confirms anyway, her heart in her throat. “Can you see it from here? Is something wrong?”

“No. There’s company coming down the road—maybe two miles away now. Two men, and I’ve seen enough of your sketches …”

That’s enough to nearly take Phi’s legs out from under her, and she staggers back a step to keep her balance. “Who?”

“Terry and Lanra. And they’re the two you draw the most, so I think I’d know them.”

Quil is at her side in a flash, hands halfway out like she’s about to offer to hold Phi up when both of them know that wouldn’t be likely to work. “What do you want to do? Wait for them, go to meet them?”

She wants to run there, wants to be there already, two miles down the road. She wants to run in the opposite direction, in case Valira is wrong, even though she knows Valira would never be cruel enough to say it unless she was sure. She wants to sit where she is and let them come. “Meet them,” she says. “If they’re walking and we’re walking, we’ll meet all the sooner.”

“Then let’s go,” says Kithri, all impatience, but she lets Phi set the pace.

Phi tries so hard to walk at her normal natural pace that she does a very poor job of it. Sometimes she finds herself almost jogging, and others barely moving at all, but her companions gamely keep stride with her without saying anything about it, though Valira does chance a joke about turning Phi into a hawk and letting her fly to them.

The country is hilly and forested both, and the road winds between the hills, so they can’t see far. Instead, they come around a corner and there, maybe fifty yards away, just coming around the curve, are Terry and Lanra. Terry is laughing at something, making a broad gesture, half-turned as he walks, without the anticipation Phi is feeling choking his throat. They don’t have Valira, after all, to tell them how close Phi is.

Lanra spots her first, catching sight of four strangers bristling with weapons and armor down the road. There’s a split second where he stills, hand hovering over his sword, and then he sees her. He lets out a yell fit to wake the forest, startling Terry, and then he’s running and Phi is too, dropping everything that might impede her progress, and they meet halfway in a crash of armor.

He’s just as tall as ever, his hold on her bruisingly strong but an anchor for the maelstrom of emotions she’s feeling. He’s not saying anything, and neither is she, just hugging as close as they can, the rest of the world shut out.

Until, of course, there are footsteps, and then a dear, familiar voice, warm and choked. “Hello, Phi.”

Phi doesn’t need to ask Lanra to let her go. He knows what she wants almost before she does, and even if Terry’s been the go-between for their messages to each other all year, with neither of them good at writing what they feel, he still understands her. He steps away, and there’s Terry.

A year on, a year of travel and hard living, and he still looks mostly the same. A little sun-brown, a little tired, and Phi is sure there are scars she’ll have to look for later, just like he must be cataloging hers now, finding her differences. There are many of them, she knows. They’ll have to relearn each other.

“Hello,” she says, and his arms are out, and she holds him. He’s whispering choked-off, lovely things that she can’t reply to, too busy dripping stupid relieved tears into his pauldron.

Behind her, she can hear Kithri taking the situation over with her usual aplomb, introducing herself and the other two to Lanra, asking if he’s eaten, and then asking what he’s there for, which makes Phi lift her face from Terry’s shoulder to meet his eyes. He’s crying too, and smiling, and Phi thinks of the day they decided to get married, which felt much like this one, full of so much disbelief and joy that there was nothing to do but laugh and cry at the same time.

“Gari heard, a day or two ago, that the king is a dragon and also dead,” Lanra is saying, dry as dust. “We thought maybe that meant that you’d be coming down this road, and we came out to meet you.”

“News spread that fast?” she asks, and can’t be embarrassed at the obvious tears in her voice, not with Terry’s arm still around her, keeping her close.

“When the news is that the king is a dragon and dead, it’s a shock we’ve only heard now, if you’re so close to us.”

Lanra comes over to her other side, so she’s bracketed between them, and Phi can finally blink the tears out of her eyes and face the other three. Quil is holding Phi’s shield, the weight of it dragging her arms down, and Valira is holding the rest of what she dropped. “Terry, these are my friends,” she says, with no grace at all.

Terry, of course, never requires grace from her. He just smiles at them. “I can recognize them from your letters. Kithri, Valira, it’s a pleasure. And Quil, maybe I can relieve you of that?”

Quil is half-hiding behind Valira, and looks like she’d prefer to sink into the ground than hand over the shield, but when Terry holds out his free hand, she hands it over anyway. Terry has always had that power, to bring people out of themselves.

Valira speaks first, as she so often does when silences seem like they might stretch out into awkwardness, and Lanra answers with good cheer, and somehow, after a year of absence and difficulty, after saving the world, Phi finally has something easy.

It’s slower to walk, with Lanra and Terry both unwilling to let her out of arm’s reach, but Phi doesn’t mind the stumbles, or Lanra’s complaints that her massive swords keep hitting him in the leg. Lanra, Valira, and Kithri mostly keep up the conversation, and Phi walks at Terry’s side and checks on Quil when she can without it being obvious, and always finds Quil smiling but never quite in a way she can believe.

*

When they make camp, much earlier than they would have before Terry and Lanra showed up, everyone ends up exchanging covert looks, trying to decide who should most be left alone with whom.

Valira, with her tendency to cut through knots and her sense of people that’s much better than she’ll ever admit to, breaks the silence first. “Kithri, keep me company while I catch us some fish, won’t you?”

Kithri scowls at her, either for taking her out of a situation where she can meddle or for coming up with a good idea before she did, but she sighs and goes to stand with Valira anyway, before casting a look around at the four of them remaining. “Don’t get into any trouble,” she says, and sweeps off with Valira in her wake, Valira throwing an apologetic smile over her shoulder as she goes.

Quil stands immediately. “I should go with them, the three of you—”

“Not at all, she didn’t want me to be bored,” says Lanra. “You and I will let them be soppy for a while and have a talk. After what Terry told me from Phi’s letters, I already feel like we’re friends.”

That’s the best thing Lanra could have said, and Phi turns to Terry with relief, trusting that Lanra will help Quil shake off some of her fear and remind her that Phi has promised she’ll be accepted. Terry is smiling, though there’s a shade of something in his eyes she can’t yet interpret when he offers a hand. “Shall we go in the opposite direction to the local stream for a bit?”

Phi takes his hand. “We shouldn’t leave for long, but yes, of course.”

Their first ten minutes alone together are nothing but relief and joy and frantic kisses that make Phi wish they were home safe and alone behind a locked door. When they have hold of themselves again, both of them shaky and smiling and unwilling to let go of each other’s hands, Terry is the one to break the silence. “I want to hear everything. I want to tell you everything. I’m not sure where to begin.”

Phi has said so much in letters, but she wants to say it all over again now that she can see him. “Me either. So much has happened, and I haven’t even written you about the last parts of it.”

“It’s true, then. You killed a dragon? Killed _Seath_?”

“And Lolth’s earthly form,” Phi admits, and watches him gasp, watches the belated fear for her cross his face. “It was a strange day. It all seemed so much easier than it should have.”

“An easy battle just means you prepared well enough,” he counters, but he shuffles a little closer and kisses her on the cheek, an easy comfort. “Nobody hurt too badly? _You_ weren’t hurt too badly?”

“No. Some acid damage, some wounds, but Kithri took good care of us. It’s just taken time to deal with everything.”

He offers a tentative smile. “I was half-afraid I would get a summons to the palace saying my wife had been crowned queen, for a few seconds after we heard the news.”

Phi laughs a little, as she’s meant to. “We ran away before anyone could begin to suggest it for any of us. I’m no queen. And none of the others want it either.”

“I’m glad to meet them at last. Are they coming with us?”

“Kithri for a few days. The other two, until other commitments call them away.”

“Good. You’ve talked so much about them.”

Phi shrugs. “They’re family,” she says. She knows what family is and isn’t, by now, and knows what the three of them are to her. Friends doesn’t suit, and companions is too bloodless for what they’ve become in a year. She knows her brothers will take some time to agree with her, knows how slow to trust all of her family is, but she thinks even Len will admit, within minutes of meeting them, that there’s no one who needs a family more.

“Then they’re my family,” Terry replies, as simple as that, so easy with his affection that it still makes her breathless sometimes.

There’s a snap and a shout from Lanra, back at the camp, and Phi moves without thinking, reaching for a dagger when she realizes she put her swords down out of arm’s reach for the first time in months and running back in that direction just in time to see Quil blink back out of nowhere, and a fire burning merrily in the center of the camp. The smell of ozone is strong in the air.

“I just asked her to light the fire with magic!” Lanra blurts as soon as he sees her, hands in the air.

Quil’s hands are covering her face. “Sorry, sorry, it was just a blink to the Astral Plane, I’m back now.”

“That’s a new one,” says Phi before she can stop herself, all her concerns about Quil’s magic coming back to her all at once as Terry comes up next to her, his own dagger in hand.

“I’m fine,” Quil insists. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your reunion.”

“We’ll swap,” says Terry, sliding his dagger away as she drops her hands to look at him. “Phi and Lanra could use the time just as much, and I want to know you.”

Quil gives Phi an alarmed look and tries to object, but Lanra is already standing and Terry moving to fill his place after one last squeeze of Phi’s hand. Lanra is frowning a little as he approaches Phi, but he puts his arm through hers and pulls her away when she wants to smooth over this meeting Quil is so worried about.

“That happen often?” Lanra asks as they get out of earshot.

Early on, Phi was startled by it too. Allan and Urien had their difficulties with magic, and Iain’s druidic talents had gone strange sometimes, but there was nothing like Quil’s sudden spurts of power, and their unpredictability made her antsy. Now, though, she only regrets them because Quil hates them so much, and worries that there have been such changes in them since the Boreal Valley. “More than any of us would like,” she says.

“We’ll ask Allan about it,” says Lanra, and changes the subject.

When he steers them back to the camp some fifteen minutes later, Kithri and Valira are back, preparing to roast fish and mushrooms for their dinner as a break from trail rations. Quil and Terry are still sitting together, her with her hands wound together in her lap, he all turned toward her in that way he has of making one person the focus of all his attention, a kindness Phi knows Quil is unlikely to be comfortable with.

But when they see she’s back, both of them smile at her, unsure and hopeful, and Lanra pushes her over, and suddenly there’s space between them, and Phi sits with them and answers Terry’s prompting question about how Arfil is, since the last letter he received from her was just after they rescued him and severed him from Paladine.

She knows she’s the center of more than a few interested looks from everyone present, as the evening goes on, but it’s still the best night she’s had in a long time.

*

They reach Fairpoint Hold mid-morning, but it’s night before Phi has a chance to be alone with Terry.

She doesn’t mind it, not when she’s being greeted by the dearest people she knows. She can’t possibly resent Eddie’s arms thrown around her waist before he remembers his dignity, Ronan’s glistening eyes, Tyler’s familiar and dear voice using her old nickname. She treasures the sight of Len and Kithri having a brief, silent battle resulting in a delicious dinner conjured in what seems like no time at all, of Allan getting Quil laughing within an hour of meeting, of Valira retreating when the noise and conversation overwhelmed her and Ifan seeking her out. She knows her hour of meeting with Gari, giving her everything she can about the political situation, is necessary.

But still, at the end of the day, it’s an incredible relief to shut a door and turn a key and find herself with Terry alone, and from the way he smiles at her, he agrees.

“I’m not going to ask anything tonight,” he says first thing, and even in that, he knows her better than she deserves. “In fact, if you tell me about all the dangers you were in and didn’t write about, I may start screaming. I just want to hold you, if you don’t mind.”

Phi swallows. “Yes. That sounds perfect.”

And it is, until she wakes abruptly with the moon shining in the window at the time she usually takes watch, when they don’t have to adjust their schedule due to someone’s injury. She liked the dark watches of the night while they were traveling, as a rare opportunity to be alone with her thoughts, but now, even with Terry breathing softly next to her, it feels lonely.

In a year, it’s possible to get used to many things, and more than that, it’s easy to get used to people. Kithri missed months with them, but Phi still hears the gaps where her gentle half-snores would be, and the way she always half-woke when the watch changed. There are no lumps in the dark where Valira and Quil are resting, no soft sounds of sleep or quiet wakefulness. There’s no chance of Quil waking and, seeing Phi awake, sitting with her until she nods off again.

She can wake Terry, she knows. If he knew she’s awake, he would want her to, but he’s had a long year too, and he trembled half the time he was holding her. He deserves his rest.

Instead, she eases out of bed as quietly as she can and goes out to their sitting room, where Mrs. Whiskers appears within minutes to demand space on her lap. That’s more forgiveness than Phi deserves, after leaving so long—Mrs. Whiskers is well, and plump in the way that means a few people might have been led to believe that no one else was feeding her, but Phi still left her, and Terry was only back for a week’s rest a few times in the past year.

A cat isn’t the companionship she’s used to. If she knows her companions at all, at least one of them will be awake. If she went looking, knocked on their guest room doors, she could have their silent company.

The urge is almost irresistible. She loves all of her companions, but it’s Quil’s company she misses most now, Quil’s door she would knock on first. When they were awake at night, it tended to be peaceful, something almost like contentment, the only thing like rest she got with her eyes open in the whole horrible year. She wants that tonight, that sense of someone at her side simply to be there, not sharing horrors or drinks.

But Quil deserves her sleep and privacy, when she sometimes talks wistfully about her secluded cottage and the silences there only broken by the humming of bees. Phi can’t chance waking her.

Mrs. Whiskers allows Phi to win back her affections for an hour, as she sits and wishes it were easy to be happy all at once, to really believe that everything is over with her body and soul and relax into it.

Eventually Terry appears in the bedroom door, face drawn, blanket pulled around his shoulders. “You were gone,” he says, and Phi curses her own selfishness as she gently sets the cat on the floor and stands up. “Are you okay?”

“Fine. Just used to waking up for watch. Let’s go back to sleep,” she says, and ushers him into their room, though she’s still awake when he falls back to sleep, until the time she would usually be passing the watch on.

When she sees Quil at breakfast, she’s nodding over her porridge like she didn’t sleep either.

*

The next few days are a whirl. Every sibling needs to be reassured, needs an hour of Phi’s time and wants more. They don’t ask, mostly, about her travels. Those questions are saved for breakfast or dinner, the times when the most people are at the hold and together. Instead, they tell her about what they’ve been doing, or ask if she’s okay, or sit in silence.

Phi wakes in the dead of night on her third night at home to find Terry gone, on the watch shift he insisted on taking, and Michelle sitting by the fireplace in her sitting room. They don’t talk much, before Michelle leaves, but they spend an hour of Terry’s shift sitting there by the embers of the evening’s fire, occasionally exchanging a few words, before Michelle leaves, gone as suddenly as a shadow in the sun, without a goodbye.

Terry sighs when he comes back to find her dozing in a chair instead of in bed. “Should I have stayed?”

“No. You needed to go back on duty, and it’s not your fault I’m having trouble sleeping.”

He offers her a hand and pulls her to her feet when she takes it, ushering her into their bedroom. “You aren’t the only one. Ran into Quil just now, walking through the halls.”

Phi freezes, suddenly more awake than she’d like to be. “How is she?”

“How are any of you?” Terry counters, and prods her on. “I thought about inviting her back, but I knew it would wake you. Now I’m thinking I should have, from your face.”

“No, I’ll try to get some sleep. But I’ll talk to her tomorrow.” She grimaces and wonders how Valira is sleeping, how Kithri is. “All of them, maybe.”

“I don’t mean you to take even more on.”

Phi sits on the bed and finds herself abruptly exhausted. “They’re my friends. I want to make sure that they’re okay, if I can.”

“I know.” He lays down and pats the bed next to him, and Phi goes with him with a sigh. “I just want to make sure that you’re okay, too. And if that means all three of them camp out in here with us, I’ll only complain occasionally.”

Terry is always so kind, so unafraid of making offers and sharing what he wants. There’s a bravery in it that Phi thinks is more important than any willingness to stand in front of a goddess with sword in hand. “It shouldn’t come to that,” she says, resting next to him and reaching out for his hand, sleep already dragging her down. “But thank you.”

*

Terry is up long before she is in the morning, when usually the opposite is true, and Phi doesn’t know what he says and to whom, but he comes back with bread to toast for breakfast and tells her that no one will bother her and she should sleep more or do as she pleases and talk to as many or as few people as she likes.

A year on the road, and Phi hasn’t rested during the day except when she’s trying to recover from being wounded. She eats the toast, with some jam that tastes like the summer she missed at home, and does go back to bed.

When she wakes, it’s nearly noon, and Terry is gone, with a note left that he and Lanra and Tyler have gone to the village for supplies and gossip if she needs him.

With him gone, she has a moment’s horrible fear of separation, after so long, but she grits her teeth through it and dresses for the day, picks a dress that someone thought to shake out and hang for her before her return when she packed all of her clothes away to keep them from moths before she left. Probably Len, with Terry’s help. Or maybe just Terry, thinking of her as always, she considers as she catches the vague scent of must as she adjusts the skirt. Len wouldn’t have stood for it smelling.

Dressed, and feeling foolishly naked without her armor even though she’s had it off for three days now, Phi goes looking for Quil.

Terry really has scolded everyone to let her do as she wants, because Phi asks Tomas, Ifan, and Gari where Quil is as she encounters them, and none of them try to draw her down into conversation, just offer up the last place they saw her, and Gari’s directions point her outside, as she might have guessed.

She finds Valira first, sitting on the ground in the kitchen garden even though there’s a bench not far away, hands in her lap. Valira’s eyes are closed, but she still smiles as soon as Phi is within earshot, and opens them a second later. “Hello. Doing well?”

“That’s what I came to ask you,” Phi counters, even if she really meant to come out to ask Quil first. Valira is so much in the first rush of joy at being rid of her demon that even if she’s sleeping poorly, Phi is less worried about her than she is about Quil.

“Me?” Valira asks, wry, always knowing more than she should. She shrugs a second later, though, not pushing. “Been a while since I slept someplace I didn’t have to pay for. Not used to all the stone, but it’s well enough for now.”

Phi’s heart sinks. “For now? You don’t have to stay, if you don’t want to, but I meant it when I said you were welcome to. If anyone has made you feel unwelcome—”

“I owe a few debts, after that journey. I want to pay them, that’s all. If you’re here, and Quil, I’ll be coming back.”

It’s not perfect, but it’s something, and Phi lets herself sigh. “I will be. Quil—I don’t know. I hope so.”

“I hope so too.”

“How is she?” Phi asks. “I haven’t seen her much, and with all those surges lately, I’m worried. Before, it’s taken dragons and demons to cause them. Now they’re just happening.”

She doesn’t expect Valira to tell her. Valira keeps secrets, often when people don’t even know they have them. She doesn’t give one up when a lie will do. “She learned a lot of big magic all at once, in those last months,” she says, and it’s probably even deliberate that it’s the same lie Quil has been telling. “All you can do is tell her you’ll help if you can.”

“I’ll keep it in mind. Thank you.”

Valira’s smile goes sad. “I want my companions to be happy. You don’t need to thank me for that.”

There’s been so little of kindness in the past year, but Phi has had it from her companions almost without fail, and there are thanks to be said for that, but none of them are the kind of people to accept those thanks. “Then tell me if there’s anything I can do to make you happier,” she says as a compromise.

“I’m alive, and I’m free of the demon. Anything else I’ll take as it comes,” says Valira, and waves her off. “Try the north field. Someone told her there used to be hives out there.”

That deserves thanks too, but Valira will dig her heels in if she’s pushed, so Phi just smiles and walks off to the north of the keep, where there maybe once were bees, but not in many years. Crestmaker didn’t care about the farmland. If the hold didn’t produce its own food, he was happy to wrest it from the hands of the villagers, or pay just enough to be insulting. They’ve been working to restore some of the land, to pay fairer prices, and it keeps Iain busy most days, from what she knows, the rest of them pitching in when he needs help. Maybe Valira will help too, if it won’t offend Iain to have her work with him.

Out in the north field, Quil is sitting on a stump, frowning at some rotted out piles of straw, from what Phi can tell. She’s wearing one of her usual dresses, but it looks fresh and new without robes on top of it, and she shades her eyes and smiles when she sees Phi coming, picking up her skirts to keep them from getting dirty on her first time wearing them in too long. “You look nice,” Quil calls as Phi comes closer.

“I was sick of everything I wore while we traveled,” Phi says, and smiles when Quil shifts over, giving her half the tree stump to sit on. “I feel like I’ve hardly seen you since we got here, and I’m sorry for that. Everyone’s wanted to welcome me home, but that’s no excuse, not really. You haven’t been lonely?”

“No, of course not,” says Quil, and that’s less a lie than her ever-present instinct to comfort other people before herself. It makes Phi wonder what she’s like with Cordelia, because she recognizes it in herself with her younger brothers. “Everyone’s been so kind. Lanra showed me around, and Allan’s interested in my magic, and he’s got a lot of books on it—even some on demons. I’m hoping there will be answers about Cordelia.”

“I hope so too. I don’t believe Seath could have given us our hearts’ desires even if he’d been telling us the truth, but I wish he could have. It doesn’t seem fair that you still have this to worry about.”

She feels Quil’s shrug more than she sees it, sitting so close next to her. “The worst thing is, if I’d given in, decided to kill Shulva, fought on his side, he probably could have fixed whatever it is. He knows about demons, we know that much. Knew about them.”

If Seath knew how to solve the problems he created, he would have been a lot more dangerous, but there’s no reason to say that. “You’ll find answers. We can ask Arfil and Idilus to lay aside any of Seath’s papers that might be useful for you. I don’t think your past was some long-laid plan of his, but still, he might have had a few names, or habits, to use as leverage.”

“I already asked when we left them. Maybe they’ll have some luck.” Quil sighs, and Phi looks at her in time to watch her hold out a hand just in time for a bee to land on it. “But regardless, I should go soon. I know more now, maybe I’ll see what to do when I get there, and either way—I’ve been gone so long. I didn’t tell them anything.”

First Valira, and now Quil. “Can’t you wait a little?” she asks, and knows it’s selfish. “Stay, research in Allan’s library, write them a letter and go with an answer. Then I can come too, but I can’t—I can’t leave yet, not when I’ve been gone so long.”

“I’ve been gone longer,” says Quil, but she doesn’t sound happy about it.

“You can go, but—your surges.” Phi winces as she says it, knows how Quil’s surges hurt her, make it harder for her to trust herself. Still, now that the worst is over, she has the luxury of fear for how much Quil has been lying about them, for how often they come and on cantrips Quil has cast a thousand times. “Are they still as bad as they’ve been?”

She stiffens all at once. “You don’t need to worry over me.”

Phi can’t help worrying. Someone she loves has always been in danger. There’s always been something making her look over her shoulder. And this isn’t nothing. Her instincts tell her that easily enough. “You wouldn’t talk to Arfil or Idilus, you won’t talk to me … if something is really wrong, I want to know. I want to help.”

“I’m taking care of it. It’s going to get better. It’s a matter of control, that’s all.”

If that’s not a lie, at the very least it’s a dance around the truth. Phi expects that from Valira frequently, and Kithri often. Quil only lies to her allies when she’s being self-sacrificing. “Then take the time,” she says, helpless. “Read Allan’s books, wait for word from Arfil, who can send things here faster than to where you grow up, and work on whatever it is that needs working on.”

That’s too far, she can see it in the mulish set of Quil’s mouth. All of them have independent streaks, and it led to friction on the road, nights where Valira sent them all to an inn while she nested in a tree somewhere, afternoons where Quil lagged a sulky ten yards behind the rest of them on the road, mornings where Phi refused to leave an inn until she’d written her annoyances to Terry and soothed them away. “I know how to take care of myself.”

“I know you do. But you don’t have to. You have help, and if it will get you back to Cordelia and your mother with more knowledge and safer …”

Quil shakes her head sharply and stands. Phi does too, a second later. “I’ll stay a few weeks, at least. It will take me that long to read through things. And like I said—it’s a matter of control. I can deal with my own control.”

“Quil, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply—”

“I’m fine.” She shakes her head again. “You can’t have come out here just to check on me.”

“I did, though.” If Quil can’t be honest, at least Phi can be. “I’ve hardly seen you, and I brought you here. And I missed you. Have been missing you. Terry can tell you that I’ve been restless at night, I keep waiting to relieve your watch, or pass mine on to Valira.” Quil doesn’t answer that, just turns to look at the piles of straw. “Is that all that’s left of the old hives?”

“They rotted. The swarms must have gone far away,” says Quil, tight and a little choked.

She doesn’t do any magic, but Phi can smell ozone anyway, that control Quil wants so desperately slipping away from her. Phi may want to help, but it seems she’s only making it worse.

“We’ll build new ones,” says Phi. “If you want to come back after you’ve helped Cordelia, we’ll build them for you. So you and your bees both have a home.”

Quil gives her a desperate, unhappy look. “I want to come back. Of course I do. I just have to deal with all of this first, that’s all.”

More half-truths, and Phi is hurt, but not nearly as hurt as she is worried. Still, she knows that’s all she’ll get, and she tries a smile. She meant to check in on Quil and bring them both some happiness, and now they’re both feeling awful. The least she can do is try to cheer her. “Tell me about how my brothers have been treating you, then,” she requests, and Quil, with relief, does.

*

After that, it seems that wherever Phi is, Quil isn’t.

It’s not something as obvious as avoidance. Everyone would remark on that, and Phi would have brothers beating down her door asking if they’ve fought, if she needs comfort or if Quil does, if one of them needs a stern talking to.

It’s more that after a year of battles together, they know each other’s movements through a space intimately, and they miss each other in crowds more than they should. If any of Phi’s brothers are in a room with them both, they seem to end up between them without any overt effort on Quil’s part.

When Kithri leaves two days later, there are a few hours that are just the four of them before she goes, and even then, Quil keeps Valira between them, or Kithri. Both of them share the knowledge of space, and must know what Quil is doing, but despite frowns, and Kithri’s particularly pointed “Take care of each other” before she walks off down the road, Phi never has a moment to take her aside and speak to her, apologize for pushing.

Valira draws Phi away after, asks her to help her find Iain and Kal, and it’s a transparent effort at comfort, but it could be that Valira just needs some company as well. Valira doesn’t mention Quil’s name once, but that absence is worth remarking on. Phi doesn’t, and doesn’t ask, because Valira won’t tell her. Kal, once the druids start discussing their own business, pulls her away, claiming he wants to show her a new attack he learned, and it’s good and uncomfortable all at once, being around so many people who know her well.

“Quil brought me a snack up on the walls this afternoon,” Terry says that night, pleased and bemused as well.

Phi has to swallow a stab of irrational hurt, even through the honest gladness of people so dear to her getting to know each other. “Did she say why?”

“Some excuse about Damon being too busy to do it even though it was his turn. I think mostly she wanted to get the measure of me.” He smiles at her, willing to tease if she’s willing to be teased. “It had a little bit of the air of the warning talks your very scary brothers were extremely careful not to give me. Making sure I love you as much as you love me. Which I do.”

She kisses him, as she has to after that. “I’m glad. I think you two will get along.” She’s been looking forward, abstractly, to facilitating their friendship. Terry is better than anyone else she knows at honest affection, freely given, and absolute faith in those he cares about. Quil could use all of that. But Quil pointedly seeking Terry out when she will hardly look at Phi is a strange hurt, and something she can’t understand yet. “She’s avoiding me,” she admits, because she doesn’t want secrets from Terry, no more than she needs.

Terry straightens. “I know you had a difficult conversation the other day. That bad, then?”

“I pushed too far,” Phi admits, shrugging. He knows what that means. Fairpoint Hold makes a policy of only pressing wounds with great care, and only when necessary. “I don’t blame her for it, but it doesn’t make me less worried, either. The changes in her magic surges aren’t easing up.”

His frown goes puzzled as he goes over something in his mind. “She didn’t seem angry at you,” he offers eventually. “Talked about you very fondly, and was happy to listen to me talk about you too. I won’t bring it up if you don’t want me to, but whatever she’s avoiding you about, I don’t think it’s anger.”

Phi isn’t sure how to explain that anger is the best case scenario, from Quil. Otherwise it’s self-sacrifice, an attempt to avoid Phi’s concern, or at worst, an attempt to minimize damage in case of something catastrophic, though if she’s seeking out Terry, Phi trusts that isn’t it. “Well, if she’s willing to talk to you, that’s something. I want you to be friends.”

“Then I’ll reach out as much as she’ll let me. And I think it’s time to have her and Valira in here for dinner one of these nights. I barely know Valira and I know she’s ready to be done with as many of us as can be packed at a table meeting up for meals, and I want to get to know them both better. I’d have wanted to invite Kithri too, but I understand her needing to go.”

“Quil wants to leave too,” Phi says, and Terry’s face softens with sympathy. “I want her to wait a little, so I can go with her without leaving you so soon, but it’s her sister.”

“I wish Lanra and I had thought to go that far south, or that we had the excuse. We may not be fancy magicians like Quil or Allan, but we might have been able to do something.” He puts his arm around her. “Lanra and I will go with you, if you like. I’m sure Valira will too. If you asked, this whole hold would turn out and make a procession to meet Quil’s family and fetch them back up here to help Cordelia with her troubles.”

“I wouldn’t ask for everyone. But maybe you and Lanra. If Quil is willing.”

“We’ll make sure she has company,” he assures her. “And we’ll bring her here for dinner. And while we wait, I’ll keep an eye on her as long as she lets me.”

“You don’t need to—”

“Because I want to be her friend,” he says when the rest of that sentence doesn’t materialize. “One conversation and I’m already fond of her.”

“I was lucky in the companions Seath chose for me,” Phi admits, as she has a hundred times over the past year. It would have been misery to travel with Ewhoza’s companions, even if he turned out at least a shade better than they were in the end. She never knew the other adventurers Seath lured in to massacre and wonders about them sometimes, if she would have liked them or not, but she knows she likes the people she ended up with. Quil’s avoidance of her wouldn’t hurt so much, otherwise.

“You still owe me a lot of stories you didn’t have time to write down,” Terry prompts, pulling her down to sit in front of the fire.

Phi thinks before she tells a story from early on, before everything got so hard. She talks about Quil and their inept attempts at thievery, the plan they made to pretend an engagement to steal a ring and ended up having to sneak in instead, to make Terry laugh when he’s always had the talent for being light-fingered. He does laugh, obligingly, but when she finishes, he gives her a thoughtful look, seeing something in her story that she didn’t mean, and instead of telling her about it, moves into a story of his own, about a girl he and Lanra met on their travels who could barely grasp a knife at the right end but wanted to become a rogue.

*

Quil keeps seeking out Terry and avoiding Phi as much as possible. Phi, at a loss for anything else to do, makes it as possible for her as she can, and doesn’t try to seek her out or force conversation, as a week passes and turns into a second.

In a group, Quil can be almost normal with her, or something approaching it. When Phi and Terry do host her and Valira, it’s almost the same as ever. She laughs sometimes, and sighs other times. She sits next to Valira, across from Terry, but when Phi engages her, discussing some of the moments that were just the two of them traveling, she responds, and usually tries to bring Terry into it, telling him how many times she caught Phi writing to him, or sketching him from memory.

Terry parries back that he saw just as much of them, in the margins of Phi’s letters, and that’s the one moment in the night when Quil shuts them out, turning and shaking her head a little until her hair hides most of her face as she asks Valira a bright question about the pictures Phi drew them during their travels, of the good memories they wanted to treasure close.

Luckily, Terry sees what’s happening in a moment, though he squeezes Phi’s hand tight under the table. The next time he speaks up, it’s with a question about the mammoths, and then about the mephits, and then, because Terry is very smart, the stories are pouring out. He knows the outlines of their travels, from Phi’s letters, and some of the hurts and joys, from late nights when Phi can make herself talk about it. Now, they fill in the gaps, first with the easier parts and then the harder ones.

As far as Phi knows, Quil and Valira haven’t had much of a chance to tell anyone about what they went through, except perhaps each other and Kithri before she left. Kithri is going to her lady, who will be able to listen, but both of them are lonely, and even if Quil’s mother and sister were right next to her, Phi has her doubts that Quil would confide in them. It’s good to listen to the stories spill out of both of them, even if they don’t drain the worst of the poison. Terry listens, and prompts with gentle questions, and Phi hears of moments that stick in their heads that she barely remembers, with how fast everything was happening: the Beholder Arfil killed for them when they found the Channelers, their first trip to meet Eleum Loyce, the fight with the fire giant. Valira speaks, for the first time Phi has heard since his death, about Haoti Ewhoza, more rueful than grief-stricken, with months gone. She even smiles a little when Quil dares to tease her about sympathizing with someone so nasty.

“I like them,” Terry says when they’ve both gone, Valira citing the late hour and then sighing with aggravation when Quil hastily stood as soon as she did. “I knew I would, if you like them so much, but it’s good to get to know them better. Though Quil’s been seeking me out on occasion, still.”

He knows she knows that, but it’s a chance to say anything she wants to, and she’s grateful for the kindness. “I still don’t know why she’s avoiding me.”

“You could ask her.”

“That’s likely to go well.”

Terry smiles, conceding the point. “I don’t think it’s a matter of her hating you.”

“I know. I’m worried it’s that something is wrong and she knows it will upset me.” She sighs. “I think Valira knows, at least. I should leave it be.”

Terry puts his arms around her. “She knows you care about her. That’s what matters.”

“And now she has you too,” Phi says, shifting in his embrace. “I think you’re just what she needs.”

There’s a shade in his smile she doesn’t quite recognize before it shifts to sincere happiness. “I really hope so,” he says, and pulls her out of her chair to clean up the dishes from dinner.

*

It’s Len who brings it up, brusque as ever, while she’s helping him do the dishes. “Are you and Quil at odds? She may have saved the world, but she can go back to her family if she’s upsetting you.”

Phi is shaking her head before he finishes speaking. “We’re not fighting, or not in any real way. I’m worried about her and she hates me being worried, so she’s avoiding me.”

“That might be worse,” Len observes, and hands her a bowl to rinse. “She should know that you’ll be worried whether she avoids you or not, and that you have every right to worry over the people you love.”

“Don’t blame her for this. She’s—we all have reasons to not like it when people worry too much. We’ll work through it.”

Len sighs at her. “And of course that’s your answer. You can be sad, Phi. And you can let us defend you.”

“I don’t want her sent away. It’s the last thing I want. I want to give her time.”

There’s a tug to his smile, something knowing that makes Phi duck her head like a child again, hiding what she fears suddenly must be obvious to everyone. She doesn’t mind Len knowing her secrets, when he’ll never use them against her, but some secrets don’t need telling, and would only hurt if they came out. “Say the word and Gari will find reason to have her sent away,” he says, and changes the subject to how to convince Tyler to stop brewing whatever experiment he’s working on this week, since it’s making the whole west tower smell terrible.

Phi answers the way she’s expected to, smiles and flicks soapy water at Len when he scowls at her for not rinsing to his expectations and tells her she was spoiled by eating at inns or in the woods for a year, but she’s thinking the whole time. If Len is bringing it up, he’s not the only one who’s noticed, and the silence of the others is forbearance for her recent return.

She needs to fix this somehow, but she has no idea how.

*

Phi has been home for more than a fortnight, and then more than three weeks, and it’s finally starting to feel real. When she wakes in the morning on a comfortable mattress, too warm under her wedding quilt, she opens her eyes knowing where she is. When Terry says her name to interrupt a midnight nightmare, she doesn’t reach for her sword. She takes a shift on the keep walls, and then another, and a third guarding Gari, who teases her that it’s overkill and then requests that she bring Sulyvahn’s swords next time.

Quil and Valira seem to be settling in their own ways, though neither seems to find it as easy as Phi. Quil spends most of her days shut up in Allan’s library, and then with the books on demons Arfil Teleports to her, but she also misses most of a day and when Terry seeks her out when she doesn’t show up for dinner, alarmed, he discovers her muzzy and exhausted, having been asleep since the night before. Valira spends more time alone than Phi wishes for her, but she slips away and spends a night camping in the forest, and another goes down to the village and comes back with an arm slung around Tyler’s shoulders, both of them drunk and singing badly.

The morning after that, Phi goes looking for Quil.

By now, Quil has habits and haunts, and Phi has been happening not to go to them as a matter of politeness and hope that someday Quil will come to her. She puts that aside, though, and finds Quil in the first place she looks, in the sheltered part of the orchard that Terry tells Phi she’s selected as the best place to build hives.

That she’s building them is a hope Phi doesn’t know if she still has the right to. If she wants to leave and stay gone, once she’s solved Cordelia’s mystery, surely she wouldn’t be doing that work. They’ll still follow her like she’s their queen when she goes south, but if there’s a home to come back to, storage for their season’s work, Quil will come back with them. Phi has to believe that.

To her surprise as she gets closer, Terry is with her. He kissed her cheek after breakfast and told her he had work to do and would meet her in the afternoon, so it’s a bit of a surprise to see him there with Quil, laughing at something she’s saying, leaning close and listening like he’s so good at doing. They seem to be wrestling with straw and cane, working on a new skep.

Terry is the first to look up and see Phi walking across the orchard and gives her a wave and a call. She waves back, in time for Quil to turn to see her and just as quickly turn away again, movement so sharp that it hurts. Phi thinks of turning around, even knowing Terry would hate it, and leaving them in peace, but they need to have this out.

Quil, busying herself with something, steps a few feet away from Terry, then faces a pile of their tools and calls up Mage Hand. It’s a spell Phi has seen her cast a thousand times, to bring something across a campsite when it was too cold in her bedroll, to carry bigger armloads of firewood than she can comfortably carry herself, to pluck something from a height she couldn’t reach. She almost never surges during it, but Phi is just close enough to see when it happens, Quil’s sudden stiffness, the way she staggers back two more steps before a hole opens up beneath her and she shrieks, grasps the edge, and then slips, falling an alarming distance before Phi hears her hit the ground.

By then, Phi is already sprinting, and Terry catches her elbow to keep her from ending up right down there after her. Phi’s heart is too much in her throat to speak, so it’s Terry who does. “Quil? Are you okay down there?”

The first noise that comes up from the bottom of the dark hole is a pained wheeze. It’s deep enough that Phi can only see movement, the shapes of Quil’s dark hair and her paler dress. It must be nearly a hundred feet, and this one is new, Phi knows it is. Anything else, she could almost excuse as a variation of what had come before, of just something Phi had missed in the excitement of a battle, but she would know if Quil’s magic had carved a hole into the Jeno, into a battlefield, into anywhere.

“I’m fine,” Quil manages after ten long seconds, though anyone who knows her knows that shouldn’t be reassuring. “Broken leg, I think. Maybe a few other things. And I think I hit my head?”

Terry makes a soft, distressed noise and meets Phi’s eyes, looking for guidance, or something else she doesn’t know how to give. “I’ll get Valira,” says Phi. “And some rope.”

“No, I can Dimension Door up,” Quil insists, voice getting a little stronger. “It’s a lot less time. Or I can try something else.”

“Will you surge again if you try Dimension Door? I don’t want to risk you being worse hurt,” says Phi.

The silence that follows is long enough that Phi almost goes to get Valira anyway, and probably Urien as well, if she can find him. “Just … give me a moment. And both of you step back, I don’t want to accidentally end up where you are.”

It goes against every instinct Phi has, but she also knows not to argue with a spellcaster over what they need for a spell. Terry, well-trained by her siblings and Allan’s occasional disasters, backs away five clear paces, and Phi goes with him a reluctant second later before calling that they’re clear.

For most of a minute, she thinks she can hear Quil’s breathing as she evens it out, shaking off the pain, pushing down whatever loss of control brought the surge on. When they first started traveling, Phi is almost sure that Quil surged maybe one time in ten she cast a spell, and even that only after they met Frank. The presence of dragons would make it worse, but since their voyage to the Boreal Valley it’s only worsened, and it feels like these days it’s more like one in three, or sometimes even one in two.

No matter how often her magic is hurting her, at least it behaves in the moment of true need: after Quil has collected herself, she appears abruptly on the ground next to the hole.

Phi has seen her look worse. She’s seen her blood-stained and bone-broken, with bites taken from her, poisoned and acid-stained. She saw her after Seath and Lolth, after beholders and cultists. Even after some of her own worse surges of wild magic, singed and horrified, hurting herself in the heat of battle. But that was always expected. It’s supposed to be done with, now. Quil is supposed to be safe, not gasping in pain on the ground.

Terry takes a step forward, but Phi can’t convince herself to let him take care of things, even if he’s the one whose company Quil is seeking out. She’s carried Quil to safety for healing a few times. It’s easy enough to bend and lift her with a murmured apology for the pained noise Quil lets out. “I’m carrying you back to the hold. It will hurt on the way but you’ll get to Valira faster,” says Phi, as brisk as she can manage.

“I’ll run ahead,” says Terry, just at her shoulder. “Whatever healer I run into first will meet you. And then I’ll come back and mark that hole until someone can deal with that. Is it a spell to be dispelled, or does a druid need to fill it in?”

Quil shakes her head, mouth tight with pain. “I don’t know, that’s a new one. Either could work, I don’t know what’s fastest.”

“Valira can cast either, we’ll see what she has prepared when she’s done with Quil,” says Phi, and Terry nods and takes off at a quick jog, outpacing them easily while Phi is walking slowly to save Quil the pain. Just because Valira will be able to mend the hurt is no reason to make it worse in the meantime. When Terry is out of earshot, Phi sighs and meets Quil’s eyes, hitching her up in her arms a little to make sure she’s secure. “I know you don’t want to talk about it. Or maybe you are already, with Valira. Or Terry. Or someone else. But—was that because of me? You saw me, and it happened. If I’m somehow making the surges worse, I’ll do whatever I can to stop.”

“No!” Quil’s eyes go wide. “No, Phi, it’s not you. If I realized you thought it was, I would have reassured you before. They’re—it’s all me, and I don’t see any reason to talk about it when I already know the reason, and I’m trying to fix it, I _swear_. I just need a little time.”

“You don’t have to promise me. I just want you safe, even if you can’t tell me about it.” Phi hesitates. “You know there’s nothing I’d judge you for, or be angry at you about. We’ve been through too much together for that.”

“I know that. It’s just something I need to deal with. And yes, Valira knows. Or she’s guessed, anyway.”

If Valira can guess, so can Phi, and she’ll have to do some thinking about it. “I’m glad you have her, if you can’t trust me with it.”

“It’s never a matter of trust with you. It never could be.”

This is no time to talk about this. Quil can’t easily get away if she presses too hard. Phi knows she could press her advantage, but she doesn’t want to, not when they’re talking about trust. “Thank you. But it’s fine if you don’t with some things. If you can’t.”

They make it out of the orchard before Quil answers. “You’re hurt.”

Quil doesn’t need any guilt over Phi, of all people. Phi is hurt, of course she is, when she trusts Quil as much as she trusts any of her family, as much as she trusts Terry. But there are things Phi doesn’t say to her, either, things that are too much to say, that will only cause distress for no gain. Still, she can’t lie. Quil knows her too well to allow that. “You’ve been avoiding me,” she says. “If you want me to never mention it again, I can try to promise that. I just wish you’d ask for what you need, instead of avoiding me.”

“I’m sorry.” Quil ducks her head. “I was trying—well, never mind. It doesn’t really matter what I was trying to do. It’s not like I want to avoid you. So I’ll just try something else.”

That doesn’t help, not when there’s still some mystery about Quil’s magic that Phi wants to help her solve. But Phi will try to accept what Quil can share and consider what Valira would see that she wouldn’t, and perhaps enlist Terry’s help, if he’s willing. “Let me know if I can help,” she says.

To her relief, Valira chooses that moment to dive from overhead as a hawk and hit the ground as a woman, hand already out to put on Quil’s arm and help her, and they’re spared from the rest of the conversation.

By the time Terry joins them a few minutes later, out of breath from the running back and forth and with sticks and twine to mark the hole, Quil is on her feet, whole and hale again, ready to greet him with a shy smile and an apology. Terry, physical in his affection, drops his burden to clap her on both shoulders and tell her not to scare him again and that if he’s such a terrible assistant at skep-making, next time he’ll be the one to leap into the hole to avoid the awkwardness.

Phi thinks she smells ozone on the breeze at that, but she’s not standing close enough to be sure.

*

Quil, as she all but promised, stops avoiding Phi in the next week, but that doesn’t mean everything is back to normal. Quil is nervous, out of rhythm, and doesn’t avoid Phi but also can’t seem to talk to both Phi and Terry at the same time.

She also stops doing magic.

Phi can’t say that for sure, of course, because there are still long periods of every day that they’re apart. Quil does her research with Allan, all of it fruitless, and spends time with Valira, sometimes with Terry, and is often collared by Phi’s other brothers, seeking her out because they know Phi loves her. Phi has her own duties too, and a husband and many brothers to catch up with. It’s going to be a matter of months, catching up with everything that’s happened to them and to her, if not longer than that. She can’t abandon the efforts to watch over Quil.

But on the road, Quil used her magic as easily as breathing. She lit their fires when the wood was wet, was always casting an absent Mage Hand to steady something, or carry something. Prestidigitation kept them dry and clean no matter the weather or the wear of their travel. She might apologize after a surge that hurt someone, or torture herself with guilt, but she rarely hesitated to cast a devastating spell in combat.

Now, it’s all gone. She invites Phi and Terry both to help her finish her skep, and doesn’t use a spell the whole time. When Valira comes inside filthy from filling in the hole she made, which apparently required some tricky spellwork to fix, she makes a sympathetic face, apologizes three times, and sends her off to a bath. Allan complains that Quil is too busy with her research to demonstrate the spells he wants to see her cast, and Quil just smiles and says that there’s really nowhere nearby that’s safe to cast Meteor Storm anyway.

“I didn’t mean she should stop casting magic at all,” she tells Terry, distressed, after a week of it.

Terry, brushing her hair out after a long day, makes a thoughtful noise. “She said she was trying to get control back, didn’t she? Maybe she just doesn’t want to take risks until she thinks it might be working.”

“Maybe.” But it would be just like Quil to decide that the way to fix her problems is to stop using magic, to put all of her incredible power to rest and call it a worthy price to pay. “I just wish she’d let me help.”

“So you’ve said. But you’re helping by being there. And I’m trying too. I think … Quil cares about you very much.”

“I know.” Phi sighs and closes her eyes, relaxes back into his hands as they work through the tangles. It was only a matter of time before Lanra talked her into showing off some of her new skills, though she was insistent on using a non-magical sword for the purpose. Her hair was stuffed up in a helmet for hours while she fended off her brothers one by one and then in groups. Quil, at least, seemed to enjoy it, sitting on a wall between Valira and Allan laughing at Phi pulling her blows and still coming out on top of every bout. “But I think that’s hurting more than it’s helping. She cares about me, so she doesn’t want to hurt me, so she won’t ask for my help.”

“Well, she hardly knows me and she doesn’t ask for my help either,” says Terry lightly, but beneath it, he sounds nearly as troubled as Phi feels. “We’re here if she wants us, though. And she knows you care about her very much.”

There’s something in his tone at that that makes her twist, stomach wrenching a little with guilt. “You know that—”

“I know. If there’s one thing I know, it’s that you love me.” He smiles at her, releasing her hair so it doesn’t pull at the way she’s twisted. Always so gentle with her, even after seeing some of what she can do now. “And if there’s one more thing I know, it’s that you love everyone you consider your family just as much, and in different ways. And I would never try to stop you loving someone.”

“And I know that.” Her voice is choked coming out.

“Good.” He leaves it there. He’s kinder than he needs to be, always, and Phi faces forward again, because she’s not strong enough to brush aside that kindness. Instead, she thinks about love, and the things she didn’t think of in a year because she was so busy assuring Kithri and everyone else that she’s married and faithful to that marriage. She is still both, but that doesn’t excuse her from thinking about what she wants her life to look like, especially when her husband is all but giving her permission.

A few tangles later, Terry starts talking about some story Ronan told him over lunch, light and easy, and Phi will never be as grateful for him as he deserves.

*

Terry seems to understand that she’s still feeling thoughtful the next day, because he suggests a day spent just the two of them and goes to fetch them enough food to last before locking the door and telling her, when she objects, that she can take a day or two before trying again to get Quil to confide in her.

When there’s a knock on the door sometime in the early afternoon, Terry whispers “Ignore it and maybe they’ll go away,” which is enough to make her smile, but which doesn’t bear out. A moment later, the knock comes again, and Ifan is calling for Terry.

He doesn’t sound upset, but he does sound insistent, and Terry sighs and stands to answer the door, Phi rising after him, already looking for the nearest sword. “There are some girls at the gate and one of them says she knows you and Lanra,” Ifan is saying when she thinks to pay attention to the situation, and that brings her up short. “And the rest say they know some of the others. They’re still arguing their way in to see Gari.”

“Wait, Wynne?” says Terry, startled and pleased. Phi smiles at him when he smiles at her, because she’s heard about Wynne, and isn’t surprised she would seek out her mentors, even if apparently she has company now when she was on her own before. “Red hair? Trips every other step?”

“I didn’t see her walk, but I did see the red hair,” Ifan agrees. “All five of them are wearing some ridiculous dark glasses, so I don’t know what that’s about, but Gari will sort it out. But if she’s here with your reference, we thought you’d want to see her. Lanra’s down in town, so I bet she’ll be glad to see a familiar face.”

Terry makes a face at Phi. “Sorry about our day. Want to come meet her?”

“Of course I do,” she assures him, already pulling on shoes, which had seemed less important than a sword a moment ago. “Who are the others asking for? Don’t tell me Damon went on a trip and adopted a girl as well, or Tomas.”

Ifan grins at her, which is enough to relax her the rest of the way. He clearly doesn’t think these girls are a threat. “Quil and Valira, apparently, though one mentioned Kithri as well.”

They may not be a threat, but that’s enough to give Phi pause. Very few people know where Quil and Valira are. Arfil and Idilus and Solomon all do, and Lauren and Keene as well, and a few other friends from their journey, but most of them would have sent a message, if they’d sent people to see them. Still, Ifan isn’t worried and Terry is smiling, so Phi reminds herself that she doesn’t need more than her belt knife to make trouble if they turn out to be a threat.

The hall is full of noise and chatter as they get closer, the overlapping of what seems like a dozen voices, and they meet Quil on the way, looking baffled but greeting them with a smile. “Allan just sent a Message saying there’s a visitor looking for me. Has someone decided to stop by without telling us?”

“Some girls, apparently,” says Phi, shrugging. “Terry knows one. Best we can do is go in and see. One’s looking for Valira too, maybe the same one, but not me, so I don’t know who it could be.”

Quil’s brows pinch together, but they keep walking, and Terry, looking between them, tells a quick story about Wynne, eager to prove herself by cooking rations at their campfire one night, burning herself no less than three times, before they push the doors to the hall open.

Phi can parse a situation quickly, most times, and it only takes a glance to find the strangers in the room, standing in a cluster, half facing Gari, half craning their necks looking around. They’re all, as Ifan said they would be, wearing strange dark glasses, and Phi blinks, surprised, to recognize the nun from the Boreal Valley who first broke free of Sulyvahn’s spell and started a revolution.

Quil, though, recognizes one of the others even sooner, from the way she gasps. Phi follows her gaze to one of the ones craning her neck, a tiefling girl, weary with travel, carrying some kind of glowing stone clasped in both hands. Phi knows the shape of those horns and the smile, and isn’t surprised when Cordelia shrieks “Quil!” and runs at her full-tilt.

Judging by Quil freezing, she’s much more surprised, and her sister almost bowls her over in her joy. That’s enough to remind Phi that Cordelia isn’t supposed to be able to feel joy, or much of anything. She’s not supposed to be vital, laughing and crying and trying to talk all at once, while Quil lets out a hurt noise and just clings to her.

Cordelia pulls away, but just enough to thrust the crystal she’s carrying into Quil’s hands, and then there’s blue light spiraling around her, bright enough to make Phi’s eyes water, and then it’s gone, and she’s gasping with her hand pressed to her chest. “What was that?”

“Your soul,” says Cordelia, giddy with it. “I brought it to you.” And then, eyes narrowed, she smacks Quil’s arm open-palmed, though it seems firm enough to make Quil wince. “And you! You saved the whole world and didn’t once say!”

“I was coming to save you,” Quil says, slow and dazed, hand still pressed to her chest.

Phi smells the ozone a second before Quil wrenches herself a few steps back from Cordelia, flames breaking out across her skin. They don’t seem to burn her, but when Cordelia reaches out, she has to flinch back. She doesn’t seem surprised, though, just concerned, and she only stays as far away as she has to, to avoid being burned, talking low enough that Phi can’t hear her over the sound of the tumult in the rest of the room.

“I’ll take you over to meet Wynne,” says Terry, pulling her a few steps, and Phi goes, to give Quil and her sister the privacy they need.

Terry is as good as his word, and Gari is indulgent of being interrupted when it’s clear these girls are here on the business of family rather than anything else. Phi meets Wynne, who stares at her wide-eyed, tells her she heard a lot about her, and drops a paper she was holding when Phi tries to shake her hand, and greets the nun again, who introduces herself as Tesni and apologizes for the chaos. The other two girls she doesn’t recognize at all, both blonde, one glaring and one, slightly familiar, alternating between staring at the reunion by the door and beyond it, looking for someone. The glaring one eventually divulges that her name is Star and says, with teenage loathing Phi hasn’t heard since Eddie got through his worst phase, “I know who you are” when Phi tries to introduce herself.

The other one is just about to be coaxed into an introduction when Valira comes in from the fields, dusting her hands on her dirty trousers, and Phi places the familiarities in the other girl a moment too late, the freckles and the specific shade of green dye Valira talked about when she was drunk once. The girl shrieks Valira’s name at an ear-splitting pitch and runs at her.

Valira responds first with wild-eyed terror and then dawning shock, and Phi thinks of her quieter nights, talking about dearly loved and even more dearly missed cousins, and wonders which one this is.

“How did this happen?” she asks no one and everyone all at once.

“We were chosen by the gods,” Tesni says, soft and something like apologetic. “Several of them. To restore Cordelia and take care of some other things.”

Gari claps her hands, bringing attention to herself from everyone except Quil and Valira and their relatives, though Phi notes with relief that the flames around Quil are dissipating before she faces Gari. “I think there’s a long story to be told here, and the three of you might want to tell it to us over some late lunch, since you must have been traveling all day. We’ll let them have their reunions in peace.”

The story that unfolds over the next two hours is almost unbelievable: at least three gods working in concert, a series of unbelievable coincidences, a trip to the Nine Hells, a dead succubus, and Cordelia, freed and returned to them. Wynne does most of the talking, bubbling happily on but blushing at the focused attention of a room full of adults, with Tesni filling in the details when Wynne’s enthusiasm outstrips her coherency. Star mostly sits and glares and makes resentful comments about Arfil and Paladine that make Phi smile and wince in equal measure, but she catches Wynne’s mug before she can knock it over with an enthusiastic hand gesture three times, so there must be something in her more than the attitude she wears like a cloak.

By the end of it, Phi is almost desperate to seek Quil out, but Lanra has arrived to swing Wynne off her feet and ruffle her hair and make her tell half the story all over again, and when she goes out, Quil and Valira and their relations have disappeared, and she can’t very well seek them out when they must want privacy, so she lets Terry and Lanra convince her to help them take Wynne, Tesni, and Star on a tour of the keep and tries not to worry when the rest of their companions don’t show up to the stuffed-full dinner table that night.

*

Fairpoint Hold seems twice as loud and three times as busy with five adolescent girls in residence, none of them brought up afraid, all of them loudly planning their glorious future.

Phi isn’t sure what to do with it. At their age, she was with Sobak, learning how to kill and then learning how to lose people she loved. She can see those of her brothers who have the hardest time with it in who’s away from dinner the second night: Allan and Tomas are both gone, and Iain and Kal send a weak excuse about wanting private time. Len is wary, but he stays, and gets in a scowling match with Star when she tries to avoid eating enough vegetables that she loses, turning her ears red for the rest of the meal. Ronan is in his element, and Ifan and Eddie are too, both of them glad not to be the youngest, happy to lord their vast experience over the girls. Quil is younger than they are too, Phi is pretty sure, but after saving the world, they wouldn’t dare to treat her so. These new guests, though, are fair game.

Dinner is also Phi’s first opportunity to assess how Quil and Valira are doing, with both of them sitting next to their relatives. Valira, at first glance, is doing very poorly indeed, from the white of her knuckles as she clutches her wine goblet, Gari having broken out a nice vintage for toasts. She only looks at Trilli out of the corner of her eye, and it looks like she’s been crying. Lanra, always more of a gossip than he likes to admit, told Phi when he came to fetch her and Terry for dinner that he’d heard Trilli yelling in Valira’s room in the morning, so that’s not a surprise. Phi will have to keep an eye on that.

Quil is doing better, though she seems dazed enough that Phi would bet she doesn’t quite believe Cordelia is there, laughing and flicking spoonfuls of food at her friends. Cordelia has also, sometime in the past day, acquired an axe that Phi is fairly sure used to be Lanra’s, which can lead to nothing good at all. Phi kicks Quil gently under the table and raises her eyebrows in question when the table is concentrating on some story of Eddie’s, and Quil smiles at her, startled, and shakes her head a little.

That’s enough of an answer for the moment, anyway, and Phi smiles back and turns just in time to catch a squint-eyed look from Cordelia, who doesn’t smile when she sees Phi looking, just gives her a look of clear assessment that makes Phi think there’s not going to be much that can match her on a battlefield, if she decides to make use of that axe.

As she often does since she arrived home, Phi lets the conversation wash over her, concentrating more on the feeling than the words being said. Terry’s shoulder is companionably against hers, and Quil is smiling, holding her sister’s hand even though it means she’s eating with her off hand. Her brothers are smiling, and Gari is holding court at the head of the table, and nearly all the people she loves are happy and here. It’s something to be grateful for.

She’s deep enough in her contented haze that she hardly even realizes who’s speaking until Valira’s voice, high and strange, cuts through the chatter. “She what?”

Phi sits up straight and looks at Quil, whose eyes are wide, and follows that back as best as she can. Trilli was saying something about their adventure in the Nine Hells, embroidering a tale about the succubus they fought, and now she’s puzzled, staring at her cousin. “Was possessing some kind of paladin, apparently,” she says again, and may as well have shot a cannonball into the middle of the table.

“Not a very good paladin,” Star mutters into her plate, but even she then notices the silence spreading from Valira outwards, first her companions realizing what’s wrong, and then everyone else realizing that something is, even if they can’t tell what.

Months after his death, Haoti Ewhoza is still a sore subject, if not as raw a one as he was on their trip to the Boreal Valley. Valira has always seen too many echoes of him in herself, and Phi knows there was a discreet, horrible conversation with Solomon on Lordren’s island after the end, an offer made and rejected out of hand. After a dragon and a goddess, a succubus would have been no trouble at all to find and kill, to free Haoti’s soul so he could try again, but Solomon had said he wouldn’t want it. Now, though, he’s free, as part of an arrangement three gods worked together to make. That means something.

Phi knows an instant before she does it that Valira will leave. “I have to go,” she says, and then she’s gone, nearly dumping her plate as she goes.

Trilli is half on her feet to go after her in the ensuing silence when Cordelia interrupts. “Give her a minute, won’t you? There’s something we don’t understand here.”

“That’s why I’m going to ask her what that is,” says Trilli, with all the eagerness of her youth, but she’s already sitting back down.

“You can ask later,” says Tesni, who’s hardly said two words through dinner, and it breaks the spell of awkward silence with worry and Ronan transparently changing the subject.

Phi and Quil exchange looks, Quil shaken fully out of her daze, because Valira needs time, but if she’s given too much, she’s likely to be out the window and into the woods and not home or human until the morning at the soonest. After a moment, Phi taps her own chest lightly. Quil deserves to stay with her sister, especially if her sister is the one with the reins on Valira’s impetuous cousin.

For a moment, Quil frowns, and then she tilts her head in acquiescence. Phi smiles, and under the sound of renewed conversation she leans towards Terry to whisper in his ear. “I’m going to make sure she’s okay.”

“I’ll keep an eye on things here,” he promises, no second-guessing, no asking if she needs help, and gives her a kiss on the cheek before she leans away again.

Phi stands with a murmured apology, and Trilli glares and a few of the others glance at her, but for the most part, Ronan has control of the conversation, and Phi can easily leave the warmth and company of the dining room behind, looking for Valira.

*

Valira is on the wall when Phi finds her, hands clenched on the stone, staring up at the stars as they come out.

“I should have pushed a little more after he died, I think,” Phi observes, coming to lean next to her. “I knew there were parallels that discomfited you, but I thought it was that you were worrying about your own future. I’m sorry. Of course it wasn’t just that.”

“It was partly that,” she says, still staring up. “Maybe even mostly that. But I was … I was responsible for him, in a way. And I failed in that responsibility. Even if he wanted to stay dead, I should have thought to free his soul.” Her voice goes quiet, breaks a little. “I abandoned him.”

Phi shakes her head. “You did no such thing. You understood him more than the rest of us, but that didn’t make him your responsibility. I didn’t think of killing the succubus either, once Solomon said we should let him rest.”

“And he wasn’t resting, and now my cousin is the one who freed him, of all the people.”

“Yes, your cousin,” says Phi, because she has no illusions that this is all or even mostly about Haoti Ewhoza at heart. “Apparently you had a fight earlier.”

“She had a fight,” Valira corrects, with a hint of her habitual wryness. “She left them because of me. She came looking for me, and I don’t know if she’ll be welcome back at home before all our parents die.”

_Good,_ Phi thinks and doesn’t say. “And?” she says instead.

“They were my responsibility too, that day, and I didn’t just ruin my life, it seems. I broke the community.”

“You didn’t do any of that. Your parents did that well enough themselves.” She doesn’t think Valira will ever hear that truly, but it still needs saying. Maybe someday it will sink in. “You had responsibilities to Quil and Kithri and me too. You didn’t fail in those.”

She snorts. “No. Only in my duties of care to people who can’t take care of themselves half so well.”

Phi talks less about the time before they thought they killed Crestmaker than Quil or Valira do about what led to them being on their own. It’s too much to say, sometimes, and she knows they both look to her as some model of what they want, that she and her brothers and this home seem like some kind of miracle to them. Now, though, she can hardly avoid it. “Valira, is it my fault that I couldn’t protect my younger brothers from the training I had to go through?”

That finally gets Valira looking at her, and from the way her mouth moves, she plays out at least three exchanges in an argument before she tries speaking again. “Point taken. But I can _feel_ like I failed, can’t I? With Trilli? With him?”

“You can. I do, often. You of all people know how much Quil does. I’m not saying you can’t feel guilty. I’m just saying that none of the responsibilities you’re guilty over were yours to fail in.”

Valira goes back to staring at the stars, and Phi lets her. She only answers quickly when she’s lying. “I never had the right words for him. Not once. Everything I asked of him, he didn’t want to do. I should believe Solomon and just let him rest, but I can’t imagine doing it now.”

“He can always refuse if you try,” Phi points out. And then, because she can’t stop wondering, and Valira has no worries refusing a question if she doesn’t want it, “Did you have feelings for him?”

It’s a question that never would have occurred to her before Haoti died, given how much he aggravated all of them. It’s one that Quil would be horrified to have to ask, and one Kithri would scoff at. Phi does her best to speak without judgment, and wins a wry smile in response for it. “No. Not the kind you mean. He wouldn’t have let me, if I’d tried to love him into being better, and I had too much respect for both of us to try. But I wondered sometimes if he did for me. He offered to kill Arfil for me once.”

And what a horror their life was on the road, that Phi can see the romance and the kindness in that sentence. “That doesn’t make you responsible for him.”

“I know.” Valira hesitates, frowns, and turns away from gazing at the sky to pin Phi with a serious look. “And you’re not responsible for Quil’s troubles with her magic.”

Phi winces. “You know what they’re about.”

Valira shrugs. “She didn’t tell me, but yes. That’s not my worry. I think it will work itself out. I worry about it upsetting you, because of how much you care for her.”

That might be honest worry, but there’s a dig in it too, for pushing when Valira is already feeling wild, too much brought to the surface at once. “I’m married,” she says, and it’s a weak response the way it never was on the road. “I love Terry,” she adds, just as true, and just as weak a response in the starlight, when she knows what Valira is getting at.

“And my grandmother loved her first husband as much as she loved her second, which is why I’ve got so many cousins,” Valira says, which draws Phi up short. “They got along well, from what I hear. One died before I was born, and the other moved back out of the forest when Granna died when I was six. But they weren’t jealous, or unkind to each other.”

Phi swallows. “I can’t ask it of them. Not after a year away from Terry. Not when Quil is on such shaky ground.”

“Have you asked Terry if he’d mind? Because the way I see it, he’s a man ready to throw himself into love as soon as you tell him he can, from how much he doesn’t want you alone in it, from how much he trusts that what you want—who you want—he wants too.” Valira crosses her arms. “Do you love her?”

It’s a fair question, when Phi asked her the same, and Phi doesn’t pretend to misunderstand and say that she loves Valira too. “Yes,” she says, and it feels like a gut wound to admit it. It feels like jumping off the wall without asking if Valira prepared Feather Fall first.

“Then if you can’t have this, if you can’t even want it, what’s the point of any of this happiness we’re trying to have?” Valira turns back to the stars, and Phi wonders for the first time if she’s looking up because she’s trying to avoid crying. “I’m not saying you have to act. Maybe I’m wrong, and it would hurt one of them if you tried. But if you can be happy, you should at least try. You saved the world, Phi.”

Phi looks up too. She’s traveled all across the world, in a year. She’s glad to see the familiar stars of home, the ones she knows how to follow home when she needs to. “So did you,” she says eventually. “And you have a cousin back, one who chose you, and it sounds like if you reached out, she wouldn’t be the only one. And you can fulfill your responsibility to Haoti, whatever that leads to. Can you try to be happy too?”

After a while, Valira sighs. “I don’t know if I know what that looks like.”

Phi settles more comfortably, until her shoulder brushes Valira’s, the comfort she doesn’t quite know how to offer. “Let me know if you need help figuring it out.”

When Terry calls for them nearly an hour later, Phi isn’t surprised when Valira gives her an apologetic look and takes off as an owl, but even so, as she tells her husband when he finds her with two shawls draped over his arms and two servings of dessert in hand, she thinks it helped.

*

The next day, the weather is beautiful enough that it seems to ease everyone’s minds a little. The whole hold seems to turn out into the sunshine, walking in the fields and orchards, sparring in the courtyard for the sheer joy of movement, planning an excursion to the village where the girls can buy supplies to continue their journey with.

Valira is there, and human, which is more than Phi had any hope for on waking, and she uses Len as a shield the way she would use Kithri as one as they traveled sometimes, placing herself squarely in his service to stir what needs stirring and wash what needs washing in the kitchen. Trilli wanders back and forth between kitchen and courtyard and doesn’t ask questions in so pointed a way that Phi has to assume someone explained.

Cordelia, Star, and Wynne are all sitting in a neat row watching Terry and Lanra spar in a well-practiced dance. Early on, Terry wrote that the two of them were making a little money off exhibition matches in their spare time, and they’re showing off now. Phi wanders close enough to hear the way Star tuts when Terry pays no attention to an obvious opening so he can do a fancy block instead, and stifles her smile, watching them move just for the joy of it.

It’s only when Quil appears that Phi realizes she was missing, and she looks at her, concerned, but she’s smiling. Tired, but smiling, and it doesn’t look fake, either, and she comes to stand next to Phi, watching the fight from a few feet behind the girls. “Sleeping in?” Phi inquires, since Quil doesn’t often, but she would after hard fights, when they could find an inn to sleep in.

“Allan had questions about what it was like to have my soul returned to me,” says Quil, voice going soft and wondering on the last few words.

Whatever souls are, whatever demons consume and bargain for, Phi can’t find differences in her friends now that theirs have been restored to them. If Valira seems lighter, it’s that there’s no voice in her head telling her she’s worthless. If Quil is relieved, it’s because her sister is returned, not her soul, and she’s willing to bet that’s more the tenor of Allan’s questions, and that Quil agreed half because he missed dinner. “What did you say?”

“I don’t know if I can tell the difference. Isn’t that ridiculous? But I didn’t know I was without it in the first place, so I guess it makes sense.” Quil shrugs. “I guess too much soul causes more problems than too little.”

“I’ll drink to that,” says Phi, and almost misses Kithri’s flask for a moment.

In front of them, Terry and Lanra finish whatever they were doing and Terry sweeps a showy bow. Cordelia hops to her feet a moment later and reaches out for Terry’s axe, and he surrenders it with good grace while Quil makes a noise of wordless objection that makes Cordelia grin at her and heft the axe around to test the weight.

“She is going to get herself cut in half,” Quil hisses when Terry gets close, standing on her other side and smiling at Phi across her.

“Probably not by Lanra, who knows you would be very unhappy with him and that you could tell him so with a crater in the courtyard,” says Terry easily.

Sure enough, as the two of them square off, Lanra is pulling his attacks like he takes joy in doing with those younger than he is, now that he’s allowed. Cordelia, opposite him, is smiling, and moves like someone with a little training and a lot of good instincts. “Have you seen her fight before?” Phi asks.

“Our mother made sure we could defend ourselves. Cordelia liked it more than I did. And then she … didn’t.” Quil’s face twists up with worry and guilt.

“Then it’s good she’s getting back to normal,” says Terry, and shuffles until he’s a little closer to Quil, frowning when she shies away from his touch. Phi should tell him, someday, how scared Quil is of herself. If Phi is going to be in love with her, if Phi is going to consider letting herself stay that way, he’s going to need to know more of Quil, and how scared she is of hurting the people she loves is the first thing he needs to know.

“I don’t think most of them are planning on staying,” Phi says, careful and kind as she can be. She knows what it is to have siblings away from her. “Do you know if she is? Or if she’s going home to your mother, or …”

Cordelia scores a decent hit on Lanra, though he’s moving slower than he’s capable of. Quil winces like Lanra was the one who scored the hit. “She’ll go with them when they go. You know that.”

“I don’t, but I wondered. You can’t be happy about that.”

“Of course I’m not.” Quil’s voice rises a little on the last word and Wynne twists to look at them, concerned, until Star pulls her attention back, and Quil lets the silence go on. “I just got her back. But if I want to stay here and she doesn’t, I’m not going to keep her against her will.”

“If you asked, she might put it off,” Terry offers. “She must have missed you as much as you missed her.”

“She was trapped under the weight of my soul for _years_. I can’t keep trapping her now that I know. But I’ve told her they can come here any time they need to rest, and the world isn’t ending now. They’ll have time to do it.” Quil crosses her arms, and Phi wishes she were more easily comforted by touch, because a month at home has restored her to comfort with an arm around shoulders or ruffled hair, and that seems easier than the words she doesn’t have. “I’m just going to worry.”

“You and Valira will be able to worry together, at least,” says Phi, which is the subtlest way she has of saying _What will you tell Valira when she blames herself for ruining Trilli’s life the way you just did for Cordelia?_ Quil doesn’t quite hear it, or she would be glaring more, but maybe she’ll think of it herself, or let Phi mention it after some time has passed. “And Gari would never turn them away, now. They can stay here whenever they need to.”

“And it’s not like they’re leaving tomorrow,” says Terry. “I don’t know if any of them even know where they want to go next. Why shouldn’t they stay a few weeks, or even a few months, and do some training here while they figure that out? I’m sure they have plenty to learn from the saviors of the world.”

“And others,” says Phi, grinning as Lanra moves, more agile than his size lets on, and gets his sword nearly to Cordelia’s throat before she blocks him.

Cordelia, as she and Lanra take a moment to breathe and assess each other, breaks her concentration to smile at her sister, all adolescent eagerness for her approval. Quil smiles back, her worries all but forgotten for just that second, her eyes brimming with tears just before they go wide.

Phi knows something is coming before she smells ozone and lightning, even though it should be impossible, with Quil not having cast a spell in days as far as she can tell. Sure enough, though, she disappears, and Cordelia yelps and Lanra pulls a blow at the last minute as Phi and Terry turn to look at where Quil was.

“Oh, damn it,” says Quil, so she’s just invisible, not taken somewhere else.

“Do we need someone who can cast Dispel Magic?” Phi asks, instead of asking if Quil was trying to cast Prestidigitation or Mage Hand or something else to make this less terrifying.

“No, it shouldn’t be too long, I don’t think.” Sure enough, it’s only ten seconds or so before she reappears, cheeks colored with embarrassment. Cordelia smiles at her, but Quil is rarely willing to be smiled at after a surge, no matter how harmless. Phi isn’t surprised when she brushes her skirt off and backs away a few hasty steps. “I need to talk with Valira. You all keep enjoying yourselves, I’ll talk to you later.”

Terry and Cordelia both take a step after her, but Phi shakes her head, and both of them listen to her, though she’s not about to say out loud that Quil sometimes just needs time. Instead, she gives Terry a gentle push. “Go on, help Lanra out before he gets too tired out.”

Lanra follows her lead, giving her an offended look. “You think this could tire me out? I’ll still be happily fending off their blows at sunset. Not all of us can be dragon-slayers. Maybe you should stop lazing about and take them on.”

Tomas, who has been doing some actual training not far away, laughs at him. “She’d beat anyone in this courtyard into a smear on the ground, now Quil’s gone. That hardly seems fun.”

“I’d try,” mutters Star, who treats them all with a level of hostility Phi tries very hard not to find funny.

Terry, judging by his twitch of the eyebrows, agrees, but he plucks his axe out of Cordelia’s hand. “Test yourself against me first, then.”

Lanra cedes the ground, and Cordelia does too, while Star hops to her feet and takes out her flail, never far from her side. Lanra sits down with Wynne to watch, and Phi expects Cordelia to as well.

Instead, she comes to stand next to Phi. It’s not a surprise. Cordelia is smart, and as protective of her sibling as Quil is of her, as Phi is of hers. She knows Phi cares about Quil, and she wants to see if she’s trustworthy. Phi turns away from the fight, though a flail against an axe is a rare matchup, and she wouldn’t say no to getting to watch. Star isn’t anything like subtle enough to score a real hit on Terry, but someone’s trained her much more than their mother trained Cordelia. “You’re good with the axe,” Phi observes. It’s a safe enough way to begin. “Planning on making it your primary weapon? Terry will have lots of tips for you.”

“I think so. I never liked the swords as much, and I don’t want to be crossing chains with Star on a battlefield, so the flail’s out too.”

“There aren’t only three types of weapons in the world. Whatever you want to try, Fairpoint Hold is sure to have one sized for you.”

Cordelia shrugs. “I know. Quil’s told me a lot about this place since I showed up.” She looks around, and Phi automatically follows her eyes: attention around the courtyard is mostly on Terry and Star, who has enough knowledge to see Terry pulling his blows and enough pride to hate it and is going to lose within a minute of losing her temper. Wynne seems worried and Lanra amused, and of the others taking a break in their own training, most of them, like Phi, are interested in the matchup of strange weapons. Nobody, in other words, is looking at Phi and Cordelia. “Probably more about here than about what you were all doing, this past year.”

Years after Crestmaker was removed from Fairpoint Hold, thought dead, there are still things Phi doesn’t talk about with her brothers. Some they all share and don’t need to discuss. Some are hers alone, but they aren’t healed enough to talk about yet, though Terry and Lanra and sometimes Quil now hear the edges of them. “It takes patience,” she says, because she knows that above all. “Come on, I’ll show you around a little.”

If Phi hadn’t already guessed that Cordelia wants to talk to her alone, the smile Cordelia gives her then confirms it. Her smile is Quil’s, infectious and sudden. She listens to Phi talk about walls and people with good grace until they’re out of the courtyard to take a tour through the mostly-deserted halls. “How is she, really?” she asks after some distance, interrupting Phi in the middle of some meaningless sentence.

“Probably worse than she wants you to believe and better than your worst fears,” Phi says after weighing her options.

Cordelia sighs, petulant. “You won’t tell me anything either, then.”

“No, probably not.” And Phi won’t feel guilty for that. She wouldn’t tell Trilli about Valira’s sleepless nights and worries either. “What has she told you?”

“Impossible stories. Dragons, gods, wizards … I wouldn’t believe it except that all of you here talk about it like it’s normal, and Star confirms a god and a wizard for us. And somehow Quil was involved in it all, and last I remember, she was leaving us because she couldn’t control her fire.”

“Her magic will always be wild,” says Phi. “But there’s impossible amounts of power in her. She called rocks from—I hardly know how she describes it. Beyond the sky, she said, but not from another plane.”

Cordelia shakes her head. “She was always powerful. As soon as she had power, after going through that portal after me. I don’t—things are fuzzy, sometimes. But I remember sometimes it would leap out of her when she hadn’t even cast a cantrip. Just because she was angry, or because someone was cruel to Mama or me, or because she was worried about me. That’s probably what that surge in the courtyard was all about. I could tell you were concerned about it. Maybe you wouldn’t have seen it, when there were dragons and demons and who knows what else to trigger them, but before she left, I always thought those surges were more about people she loved than magic.”

Phi tries very hard not to show her reaction, the swirl of thoughts in response to Cordelia’s words, about the sudden differences in Quil’s surges, and how sometimes she can’t tell what brought them on. If it’s love, or worry for those she loves, it explains a few of them. Many of them, even, but what the pattern begins to imply with only a few moments of thinking is almost unbelievable. Quil loves Valira and Kithri fiercely, but she didn’t lose control of her magic when she discovered where Kithri had been for months. She didn’t make fire in response to Valira bargaining away pieces of her soul. She did it when Phi was kind to her, or protected her, or was in need of protection. “It makes sense. She loves very deeply,” Phi says when she knows her silence has lasted too long, and wishes Terry were there.

“She does. I’m glad you know it.” Cordelia gives up all pretense of being toured around and stops to face Phi square on. “If she’s going to make her home here, she should be around people who know her. And love her.”

“She’ll have that here,” Phi promises, and if Cordelia reads more into that than she’s meant to, Phi doesn’t have quite enough control to prevent that. “But I’m sorry if you feel we’ve taken her away from you.”

Cordelia shrugs. “She was gone a while before she got that note and left. And I’m leaving too. I need to see everything without the weight of an extra soul fogging me up.”

“And your mother? Quil will still go down to visit, I’m sure—she can do it easily, especially if there’s a Teleportation Circle down there.”

Cordelia blinks at her, surprised. “She didn’t tell you? Mama sent a letter up with me—she can’t leave the shop right now, not so easily, but she wants to come. And if Quil writes back and says she plans to stay here, well … she says it’s as easy to sell herbs in the north as in the south.”

Quil speaks of her mother with wistful fondness, though it’s her sister who’s always had her intense focus. She hates to inconvenience anyone, and Phi expects there will be months of guilt, of trying to convince her mother that they can visit across miles and miles, before Quil accepts the inevitable, since her whole family seems to be made up of stubborn women. “You’re smart to travel and avoid that particular battle,” Phi says, and smiles when Cordelia does. “And no. She likes to think before she talks about things sometimes. She’ll tell you about our travels when she’s done thinking.”

“She’ll be protective of me forever,” Cordelia says on a sigh that makes her seem more her age. “I’ll never get to hear all the fun things.”

Phi starts walking again. They both have plenty to think about, she suspects. “Well, I can’t tell you all the fun things, but I can tell you about the time she and Valira fell into thrall to some strange mushroom and were sitting in the Underdark giggling for a good five minutes.”

Cordelia grins, and Phi has enough siblings to know what kind of blackmail she’s offering, but it’s a gesture, and one she’s willing to make, if only because it keeps Cordelia distracted while Phi thinks.

*

“Cordelia has a theory about Quil’s magic surges,” she tells Terry that night.

Terry, halfway out of a boot, pauses to frown at her, puzzled and then concerned. “Is that what the two of you were talking about? I didn’t think you would share your worries with her without Quil’s permission.”

“She wanted to explain what had happened. Or she has some guesses. Apparently Quil’s magic surges when she’s feeling deep emotions, especially about people she loves.”

At this rate, the boot may never come off. Phi doesn’t mention it, just sits down not far from him and waits to see what he’ll say to that. “We’re talking about all of that, then,” he says at last.

“It seems unfair to you to do it, and even more unfair to you not to, so it’s up to you.”

Most times, Terry seems to have the right thing to say right away, or maybe it only seems that way because Phi has to work so hard at it. Now, there’s a long enough silence to make her squirm, as he methodically takes both of his boots off and sets them aside to brush off later. “Who you love is your business, though I know you’ll hate that answer,” he begins at last, and reaches out for her hand when she flinches just as he’d guessed she would. “I know you love me, which is a good place to begin.”

“I do. More than ever.”

“And you love Quil.”

That’s a harder question, but she owes him her honesty. “Yes. And not as a sister. But if it will hurt you for me to even try—you’re the one I married, Terry. And I love you. I take those commitments seriously. Given time, it might become more sisterly.”

“On both of your parts, because the trouble here is that you think Quil might love you, too.”

It seems impossibly presumptuous to think, let alone say. Phi still isn’t sure—if her sisterly feelings for Cordelia make her surge, it’s possible her feelings for Phi are sisterly too, and that somehow Valira doesn’t inspire them, or Phi simply hasn’t noticed or seen if she has. “I’m starting to wonder,” she allows.

“Maybe I’m biased, because I find it hard to believe that there’s anyone you meet who doesn’t fall in love with you, but I think she does. I’ve thought since I met her, that night in the campsite. Just the way she talked about you. And the way you’d talked about her, in your letters … none of this is a shock to me.”

“It is to me,” Phi says, halfway to annoyed though she knows he doesn’t deserve that. “And I still—even if there are feelings, there’s still you. You’re important to me. What you want is important to me.”

He closes the small distance between them until he can take her hands. “Your heart is big enough for both of us. And I won’t presume, she and I are still learning each other, but my heart is big enough for both of you.”

“Then what do we do?” And then, answering herself: “Nothing yet, probably. Her sister and her soul have just returned to her, and we’re all barely used to not being at war. And if this happens, any of it, you and she deserve some time to catch up.”

“Then I’ll get to know her, and you’ll keep reminding her that you care about her.”

Phi bites her lip. “Her surges. If she starts having them around you—she’s all but stopped doing magic around me, and she probably will around you too, but she doesn’t trust herself at all. You should know that. A surge nearly killed Valira in our battle against Crestmaker, and it terrifies her.”

“I can take care of myself, and I’ll make sure she knows it,” he assures her. “And I’ll give her space if she wants it, but I know a thing or two about people who think they only cause harm in the world but who do the opposite.”

Phi smiles at him and shakes her head. “I wish things could be simpler. That I make things simpler, for you. But I think—I thought so often, when I would tell her about you, how much you two would like each other. I hope you do. If I didn’t think you’d fall in love easily, I would try to find another way.”

Terry kisses her. “An incredibly powerful woman afraid of her own strength? I don’t know why you’d think I’d be attracted to such a thing.”

After a year of using her skills for good, Phi can’t muster much fear for them, no matter the way people sometimes look at her after a fight, especially one where Quil has cast Haste on her. Crestmaker might have succeeded, in some ways, in making her a perfect soldier, but she’s the one with the choice for how she uses that. “There are a lot of differences,” she warns him.

“I’ve had your letters, remember? I know I’m going to love Quil, and there’s no reason she and I shouldn’t take some time with that, while there’s so much happening.”

Phi has to swallow. “You’re so much more than I ever could have hoped for.”

“You deserve everything you hope for and more,” he replies, and kisses her again.

*

The days fall into a pattern, with the girls at the hold. Kithri writes and then visits, when she hears who’s come to stay, which kicks off another few days of festival feeling, but she goes back to her lady and the girls stay a week and then two, with varying levels of grace.

Most of them practice their weapons with the serious attention of people who plan to use that knowledge and want to be sure of it, and Phi, used to training her younger brothers so more brutal trainers would have less to teach, chips in where she can, not least because Quil seems to find it reassuring when Phi is the one adjusting Cordelia’s hold on the weapons she tries.

Wynne, she soon discovers, is more graceful with a sword or even an axe than with throwing daggers, but is so inclined to trip over an opponent’s foot at close range that the daggers might end up safer for her after all. She’s the most cheerful of the group, and adores Terry and Lanra enough to make Phi fond of her in turn. Star, on the other hand, is Wynne’s protective shadow when she’s not training herself, which she does more every day than anyone else. She’d rather swing her flail wrong a hundred times until she figures out the problem with her angle of swing than receive one correction, but she bests Kal in a full-on fight within the first week, and fights Tyler to a standstill within two.

Cordelia takes to every weapon they try her on with grace and glee. It’s strange and somehow wonderful to see someone who enjoys it from the very first, and chooses it when she doesn’t have to, and half the hold has made a student of her within days, for her own sake as much as Quil’s—or maybe more than Quil’s, when Quil frets every time Cordelia tries something new. Everyone wants to try her on daggers, on longbow, on sword and staff and mace, but it’s clear from the first that she favors the axe, which delights Terry and Lanra both.

“I suppose I’ll have to get used to it,” Quil sighs when Phi and Terry manage to invite her for dinner alone, Cordelia being busy hearing the war stories of half of Phi’s brothers and Valira being busy with one of her awkward dinners with Trilli, the two of them trying to work through the decade missing between them. “She wants to go off and be a fighter, so at least I’m glad she’s good at it.”

“She’s very good at it,” Terry agrees. “Give her a few months and she’ll be well on her way to terrifying. I don’t know what your mother fed the two of you growing up, but it certainly seems to have made both of you strong.”

Quil frowns at him like she’s expecting a punchline, and then at Phi like she wants a joke explained, and Phi shrugs. She’ll have to learn sooner or later that Terry’s compliments are always sincere, whatever else he might joke about. “I still don’t know why she’s decided on this, of everything,” she continues after giving up on explanation.

“She was good with that war hammer earlier,” Terry says to Phi, an aside that makes her smile. “Won two of three bouts with Star with it, and then Wynne tripped on it as she passed her and nearly opened her head up on the prying side, so Star has forbade it.”

“I am also forbidding it,” says Quil. “Axes are one thing, but hammers? That is outside of enough.”

Phi has to suppress a laugh. When Quil is worrying over Cordelia, she has a tendency to turn into Len. Perhaps there’s something about oldest siblings. “How will you be, when she goes?” she asks instead. She regrets taking the older-sister bossiness off her face, but she so rarely has time with Quil without a huge audience now, and she wants to ask, the same way she wants to ask Valira about Trilli.

Quil gives Terry a brief look, but she doesn’t hide the slump in her shoulders, either. If she trusts him that far, it’s a good beginning. “Unhappy,” she admits. “But I know she’s better now, and she’s with the people who made her better, and she can call on me if she needs help.”

“And we’ll be here to help as much as we can,” Phi promises.

“We want you to be at home here.”

Quil ducks her head, uncomfortable, which means they’ve pushed kindness about as far as she’ll take it for the day. “I am at home,” she says, and gives them a tiny smile.

She’s uncomfortable, but she means it. It’s something, at least. It’s a beginning.

*

“Arfil was in touch today,” Phi says a few days later, drawing Quil and Valira aside after dinner.

Both of them smile briefly, but they know her too well, know that if it were only happy news, she would have talked about it over dinner. “Is something wrong?” Valira asks. “I can be ready in an hour.”

Phi can’t be, which she takes a moment to be surprised and pleased by, how much she’s integrated back into life at home, that it would take time to collect all her necessary supplies. She shakes her head, though, before she can think too much about it. “No, or nothing urgent, that would require our attention. He said that he and Idilus have nearly cleaned up everything they can, and if they stay too much longer, there’s a danger that someone will try to make him king, and he has no intention of doing that.”

She’ll have to spend a day or two closeted with Gari and anyone else who cares about the political situation in Tyne, trying to figure out whatever government Arfil has put in place and what their plans might be for the border. For now, though, she has to explain to Quil and Valira, who are both frowning now. “What has you looking so serious, then?” Quil prompts.

“They know what Tyne needs—the villages still recovering from the tarrasque, the lesser demons roaming the lands, the bandits that spring up whenever a tyrant falls.” Phi takes a breath. “Some of the girls are getting restless, I can tell. If they want useful work, work that won’t kill them but will let them stretch their wings, Arfil and Idilus are the people to ask.”

Valira’s shoulders fall with relief even as Quil’s face twists with unhappiness. “It’s better than letting them find trouble on their own,” says Valira. “And Star is very focused on meeting Arfil, so maybe she won’t even complain at us sending them to people who will give them safer jobs to do.”

“It still won’t be really safe,” says Quil. “And Cordelia has had less chance to practice than the rest of them.”

Phi, at a loss with words when they all know Quil’s going to have to trust Cordelia to survive, offers an arm instead, and Quil moves through expressions too fast to parse before she ducks under it and allows Phi to squeeze her briefly around the shoulders before she releases her grip just enough that Quil can step away if she wants to, though she doesn’t right away. Phi meets Valira’s eyes, and finds her watching with one of her smiles that’s more eyes than mouth. “I’m fairly sure Trilli will follow her to the end of the world or beyond,” Valira offers, “if only to write ballads about her, so she’ll protect her. And Tesni has a good head on her shoulders.”

Quil wrinkles her nose at Valira, but there’s amusement in it, not just fear of loss. “Trilli’s certainly interesting company. She and Cordelia will keep each other on their toes.”

Trilli isn’t much like Valira at all, other than the undeniable resemblance, and Phi hasn’t heard her talk about it yet, if she’s surprised at the way her cousin has turned out, if Trilli has told her anything about what happened in the decade of her absence. Knowing Valira, she hasn’t asked, and likely won’t. “I suspect they’ll have a few wrinkles to work out,” Phi says instead of any of that. Valira’s mood is delicate enough as it is. She doesn’t need her past brought up too. “With any luck, their stakes will be a little lower, and most of them aren’t the kind to go quiet when they’re upset, so they’ll have the luxury of a few arguments.”

From the looks on Quil and Valira’s faces, they’re both thinking of the truth of that, as pertains to their relatives. Fairpoint Hold has been politely ignoring the sometimes loud conversations between Quil and Cordelia about blame and worry and their mother, and Trilli’s frequent shouts that Valira is impossible and won’t listen to her. “I’m very glad we were all a bit older,” says Valira, as tactful as she ever gets, and sighs. “Did Arfil give you an exact time for how long? We should start kitting them out.”

“Could be up to a month, but I’m guessing a matter of weeks,” says Phi, hating the way Quil’s shoulders tighten under her arm.

Valira nods, face tight, and there’s something she’s not saying, but Valira has never once said anything before she wanted to, so Phi doesn’t press. Quil reaches a hand out and then pulls it back, and when she speaks, her tone is light. “Well, if nothing else, at least I’ll be able to stop hearing about whatever odd weapons someone has pulled out of the armory and how well Cordelia did with them.”

Phi smiles, relieved, at the change in subject and at Quil gamely trying to show willing. “If it helps, Lanra said nobody should let her near a whip, her aim is apparently abysmal and there were three broken plant pots to show for it.”

“That’s something, at least,” says Quil, smiling up at her, and there’s a whiff of ozone, maybe, but it’s gone so fast that Phi could almost think she was imagining it.

*

Within two days, it’s a forgone conclusion that the girls will go to Arfil and Idilus before they leave Seath’s keep. Phi is spared the debates, which are quiet enough not to penetrate stone walls but definitely happen judging from frowns and red eyes and Lanra’s bemused mention of seeing Quil going chasing after a unicorn down one of the halls. All she hears is the result: another week, and all the supplies Fairpoint Hold can provide, and the girls will go to Seath’s keep, and let Arfil and Idilus point them to their next destination.

Now that she’s beginning to reach out to Quil and see if Quil will reach back, Phi wants to keep trying, to make it happen faster. But Quil only has one week more with her sister, so Phi doesn’t push either of them. She sits with Quil while Cordelia is training, and spends an afternoon giving Cordelia and Star both a brutal run through sword drills, because the best gift she can give her companions is to keep their loved ones alive.

Still, she doesn’t relish doing it, teaching them how to come in over or around guards, make them more efficient killers. When it’s over, she smiles at them, surrenders them to their friends, and goes for a walk out to Quil’s hives, though last she heard Quil was with Gari, talking about the political mess Tyne is in.

That doesn’t keep Quil from being the one to find her, towing Terry along by his elbow at a determined gait while he follows, somewhere between concerned and amused, in her wake. Phi smiles at them, but when Terry sees her, the concern wins out, so it must not be a very good one.

“Quil said you had a difficult afternoon,” he says when they’re close enough, close enough that he could hold her, that he _will_ if she gives him any encouragement.

“I was just teaching them how to protect themselves,” she says, and it’s half weak defense and half frustration that it’s hard for her to do, that every time she puts a weapon in the hand of someone younger than she is and teaches them how to kill better, she thinks of all of her teachers, the kind and the cruel, and she thinks of how much she wanted to protect her younger brothers and couldn’t.

“Thank you,” says Quil. “You didn’t have to, but thank you. I feel safer—I feel like _they’re_ safer. They would be doing this anyway, but they’ll do it better, thanks to you.”

It doesn’t fix it. Not even close. But it’s at least another voice to listen to. Phi tries her best smile, and it must fail, because Terry does reach out then, and she opens her arms, and lets him whisper soothing nonsense into her neck.

“I’ll see the two of you at dinner,” Quil says, quiet and already fading as she steps back.

Phi pulls herself together enough to remove one of her hands from Terry’s back and reach out. “Stay, please. If you have the time. I just need a few minutes.”

Quil doesn’t join their embrace, but she holds Phi’s hand, and doesn’t drop it as soon as Phi has shaken off some of the memories. Instead, she offers a tremulous smile and lets both of them hug her in her turn.

It’s a terrible reason for incremental progress, but Phi knows to take her victories where she can find them.

*

Everyone agrees that the girls’ last night in Fairpoint Hold will be a feast and that everyone not on guard will be expected to attend, but it’s Terry’s idea to have what he calls a “family party” the night before. It might be a silly designation when the hold is full of Phi’s family, but she still knows the guest list before he says it: the two of them, and Quil and Valira with Cordelia and Trilli, just enough of them to keep them from sinking into sadness, just few enough that they don’t have to pretend to be happier than they are.

Sure enough, the dinner is a sober affair, but it’s good, too, for Phi and her companions to all get to know each other’s closest family. Trilli and Cordelia dominate the conversation at first, and Phi has to stifle smiles at the way Trilli is clearly becoming infatuated on purpose in the way only adolescents can, wanting the drama and the romance of it. Eventually, though, they ask questions—about Terry’s travels, and then about the things they’re really curious about: what Arfil and Idilus are like, what tasks are ahead of them, and what Valira and Quil did that they aren’t yet privy to.

By the time Valira makes a show of noticing Mrs. Whiskers and tempting the girls to go over to play with her, Phi hardly has the energy to even consider rescuing the poor cat. “Needed a break?” she inquires, because Cordelia clearly thought it was her idea to go over, and Trilli will follow her anywhere, but it was Valira all over.

“Wanted to talk to you three. Seemed as good a time as any.” She hesitates and makes an apologetic face at Terry before she turns to Phi and Quil. “I’m leaving when they do.”

Phi’s stomach lurches the way it does whenever she travels by magic, and to her left, Quil reaches out for her automatically, hand curling around Phi’s forearm in a vise grip. Neither of them manages to speak.

Terry is the one to break the silence before it attracts Cordelia and Trilli’s attention. “To go with them? They might not thank you for the protection.”

“No. Just to travel with them to Arfil and Idilus, and then on from there on my own.”

If she wanted them, she would ask, Phi reminds herself, but it’s still a sting. Valira has been wandering alone for most of a decade, and Phi has hoped that she might finally consider herself at home, no matter what she’s said about debts she needs to pay. “You don’t have to be on your own,” she says, because it needs saying.

“I do. I have things to think about.” Valira fidgets and looks down at the table, and Phi thinks of a chilly evening on the walls and wonders how much of this has to do with Haoti Ewhoza. “And promises to keep. I’m going to Norene and the Underdark, to see if I can get the sheep to the surface the way I promised. It’s late to keep my word, but I owe it to them anyway.”

“We would do that with you,” Quil says, and she sounds like she’s on the edge of tears. “You could have asked.”

“I’m coming back,” says Valira, and it has the ring of truth, even if Phi’s mind is presenting her with all the lies Valira has told in their year of travel. “But there are the sheep, and I need to prove some things to myself. Give me a season—I doubt it will take that long, but if I’m not back within a season, come after me.”

“We will,” says Terry, and puts his hand on Phi’s leg so she’s between him and Quil, both of them reassuring her or in need of reassurance or both at once. “But you have to promise to call on us if you need us.”

After a moment, Valira nods. “I’ll do my best. But I think I’ll be safe enough. I don’t have a demon in my ear this time.”

And no doubt she needs to prove to herself that she’s worth something without it. “Not just if you’re not safe,” Phi says. “Even if you’re lonely.”

Valira gives her a wry smile and doesn’t respond to that directly. “As I said—I’m giving myself a season, but I don’t think I’ll take it. It will be a week or so to find all the sheep and get them out, and then perhaps a month to find them seaside land there or in Tyne and start setting them up enough that I can come back, even if I have to visit them to maintain things.”

“Are you going to talk to Solomon about Haoti?” Phi asks. If Valira wants to do something alone, she has a bad feeling it will have to do with Ewhoza, when that’s a burden she shouldn’t have to take on alone.

“No. He said his piece. But Haoti is one of the things I need to think about.”

“How long have you known you were going?” Quil’s shock and sadness seems to be turning into anger, and Phi gives a quick look at the girls and Mrs. Whiskers, but they still seem distracted. “You don’t tell us until there’s only one full day left? Surely it can wait a week—a month, even.”

Valira shrugs. “I know it’s poorly done of me, but I hate drawn-out goodbyes. I’ll be back before you know it.” She frowns at Terry, who straightens a little. “Look out for them. I know they can take care of themselves, but—look out for them anyway.”

“I know what you mean, and I’ll do my best.”

Phi swallows and says the first thing that comes to mind. “Does Kithri know?”

“I wrote her a day or two ago, when I decided for certain, so she’ll know soon. I wouldn’t leave you two to tell her.”

Somehow, Kithri knowing makes it real, and Phi has no right to be selfish with her friends’ time, to want one more person to stay when she has a whole fort full of people, but the prospect of months without Valira is still bleak. Perhaps it’s because she knows how lonely Valira will be, now that she’s learned she can be anything besides lonely. “Thank you for that,” she says. It’s better than silence. “I’m sure she’ll be Sending to you every day, and writing us all the updates. But you could write us too.”

“I’m not much of a correspondent,” says Valira, and frowns when Quil does. “But I’ll try.”

Quil gets up from her place at the table even though it draws the attention of the girls and goes to wrap her arms around Valira, who stiffens the way she tends to when someone hugs her without warning her before relenting and hugging Quil back. “You’ll do more than try,” says Quil. “If a week goes by where I don’t hear something from you, I’m coming after you.”

“I won’t make you.”

“What are you all so serious about?” asks Cordelia, and the conversation surges with Trilli scolding Valira for not telling her before, and a new spate of nosiness about Valira’s plans, about the girls’ plans, about what the rest of them will do at the hold.

Quil comes back to her seat, and when she doesn’t reach for Phi’s arm again, Phi reaches for her instead, and puts her hand on Quil’s sleeve. Cordelia gives her a sharp look, and Valira does too, only a second later, but nobody mentions it, and Quil relaxes a little.

Terry squeezes her leg and offers her a private smile in the midst of the chaos, and somehow, Phi finds herself smiling back.

*

Phi doesn’t want Valira to feel guilty, but she still hopes that she sees the genuine sadness in so many of the people at Fairpoint Hold when she announces her departure. Iain is crestfallen, Len scowling, Lanra offering company almost before she has the words out, and Tyler, who Phi hadn’t known talks to Valira at all, offers her any potions she might want to take with her.

Valira ducks her head and rolls her eyes and lets Gari ask her about the sheep and where she plans to find land for them, insisting that Tyne’s fish will taste much better than Norene’s.

After that news, it’s hard to get anything like a mood of cheer going on. Gari and Lanra and Terry between them, with help from Wynne’s amiability, manage it, but it takes a bottle of mead and a few transparent changes of subject to make it happen. Phi tries her best to help Terry where she can, and to support Quil as she tries to suppress her clear misery with laughter. Sometimes it works and others it doesn’t, but she feels better for the trying.

They don’t start out as early as Phi thinks Valira would like to in the morning. For once, she and Star are aligned on that, since Star is loitering by the gates from the moment she finishes breakfast, but the rest of them sleep off their mead and wander the hold saying goodbyes or remembering things they’ve forgotten.

When they’re finally all packed and don’t have any excuses to stay, Phi collects with the others saying goodbye at the gate. Half the hold seems to be out, in a hubbub of advice and admonishments and almost-tearful goodbyes. Terry and Lanra have taken Wynne aside to talk to her, and Tesni and Trilli are receiving advice from anyone who’s ever cast a spell in their lives, from what Phi can tell, with the exception of Quil, who’s clinging to Valira and apparently, from the sounds of it, giving her a tearful lecture.

“You’ll look out for her, right?” says Cordelia, coming up to Phi from the side with an axe slung over her shoulder. It’s one of the better ones from the hold’s armory, and Phi wonders who chose it, if it’s someone who would remember it in the hands of one of the more brutal instructors from the bad old days. Cordelia will use it much better.

“She can look out for herself,” says Phi, almost by rote.

“You know what I mean.”

Phi sighs. “I do. And I will, as much as she lets me. And you’ll come back when you have a chance? Especially if your mother really does come up here?”

Cordelia grins at her. “We’re not going to avoid home-cooked meals for too long. Whenever we’re in Tyne, we’ll stop by as much as we can. Even if we have to tie Star up to drag her here.”

Phi smiles back and gives her a quick hug. “I’ll hold you to it. And Quil will fetch you herself if she needs to.”

When she releases Cordelia, Valira is gently pushing Quil away, and Quil immediately turns to her sister, leaving Phi to catch Valira’s hand.

Valira gives her a wry smile before she can even speak. “Yes, I’ll take care of myself. Yes, I’ll call for you if I need help. No, I won’t stay away too long. Does that cover most of it?”

It does, but Phi isn’t going to let Valira get away with saying it all to cut off a goodbye. “Most of it,” she agrees, and lowers her voice, drawing Valira away so Gari, nearest, can’t hear them. “And a reminder that you may have the power, but that doesn’t mean you have to make the choice alone. If a season passes and you still don’t know what you want to do, we knew him too.”

“What do you think he’d want?” Valira asks, quiet but not as shattered as Phi might have feared.

Haoti was a hard man to get to know, all on purpose. Phi isn’t sure, after traveling with him, what god he served, who he loved, what he was like before Seath put a demon inside of him. Everything she knows about him, he let slip by accident: a fondness for wild strawberries, a memory of his mother that he cut off halfway, his surprisingly broad knowledge of the kind of birds they saw as they traveled. She knows that he was desperately unhappy, and that in the end, he was fighting the succubus with all of his attention and focus, none left for the redemption they were hoping for. “I think he wanted to live, but I don’t know if that means he would want to be brought back,” she says. It’s the best answer she has. “I’ll think about it, though. If you ask again when you return, I’ll have an answer.”

“Thank you. I’ll ask you.” Valira gives her half a smile. “I’ll ask Quil too, but she might be a little biased.”

Phi can’t help her own smile at that. “Well, you never know. She may say you should bring him back so she can finally have that argument with him she was itching for.”

Valira barks out a laugh and then wraps her arms around Phi with no more ceremony than that. Phi does too, and pretends not to hear the way Valira sniffles a bit in her ear. “You all say I should summon you if you need help, but that goes for you too. If you need help, or if you just need me, I’ll be here as soon as I can manage.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” Phi promises, and releases her.

All the girls but Cordelia are waiting, and Cordelia is extracting herself from Quil’s arms with apologies and exasperation both. Quil is teary, but Terry is coming up next to her, reaching out to put a hand on her arm.

“Let’s go, then, we’re wasting daylight,” says Star, after judging her companions have appropriately disentangled, and starts marching off.

There’s a general look around as everyone tries to stifle laughter, and then everyone is giving a tumult of last goodbyes and shouted advice and reminders, and Valira leads the rest of the girls out the hold gates.

Gari is the one to leave first, when the girls are barely ten yards down the road, and then it’s one after another as they get farther and farther out of sight, until it’s just Phi and Quil and Terry standing there, watching specks in the distance.

“They could at least have let me send them there,” Quil says eventually, voice admirably even despite the tears running down her face. “Arfil made sure I learned the palace’s sigil sequence.”

Terry smiles at her and puts an arm around her shoulders. “I’m sure they’ll all enjoy camping. Or the girls will, and Valira will heartily wish she were camping on her own, but she’ll get plenty of that.”

“I hate the thought of her being on her own for a whole season.”

“She’s doing it so she can come back and feel better about it,” says Phi, and after a moment’s thought, gives Quil a hug. They don’t do it often, but Quil seems to need it, and judging by the small noise she lets out and the way she turns her face into Phi’s shoulder, Phi should remember to do it more often.

Terry has her bracketed from the other side, one hand absently stroking Phi’s arm, murmuring soothing nonsense.

There’s the faint smell of ozone, but Quil doesn’t pull away, and Phi holds on as long as she lets them, and wonders how long they can last until they need to talk about it.

*

Phi sets herself to distract Quil as one week turns into two and then three, and knows that it’s just as much to distract herself. She still doesn’t have official duties, though she takes shifts on the walls and guarding Gari like anyone else does, and it leaves her with plenty of time free. In a few months, she may start to find that confining, might need to think about a new purpose for her life, but for now, she enjoys the free time, the opportunities to sketch her memories and her present.

Some days, she brings paper and charcoal to sit with Quil and Allan as they talk about magic and sort out questions of souls that linger even now that Quil has hers back. She’ll sketch them, Quil more than Allan, or the birds out the windows, or Arfil or Valira or Shulva, anyone she thinks of, and shows Quil when she peers in her direction. Quil always blushes if it’s her, but she doesn’t ask Phi to stop, either, so Phi keeps doing it.

Phi also takes Quil on trips within a day’s walk of the hold, into the forest nearby, to the village and the village beyond that, and then borrows a few of the hold’s horses and teaches Quil to ride and takes her out farther. Quil bounces along in grouchy misery, but she seems to enjoy their destinations: the nearby river, just warm enough to be refreshing instead of freezing to splash in, and the nearest larger town, where they can be pleasantly anonymous and bring Gari back the gossip about who’s going to end up on Tyne’s throne.

“We’ll have to come again soon when Terry isn’t busy,” says Phi on their way back from that trip. “Maybe stay a night in an inn, eat something nice, visit the shops. Idilus said in their last letter that they’re planning to send each of us some money, considering we saved the world, so we can spend a bit.”

Quil frowns at her. “Won’t the real ruler need all the gold they can get? The damage from the tarrasque will take plenty to fix.”

Phi shrugs. “Maybe so, but look around here—the tarrasque didn’t make it very far inland. And according to Idilus, it’s clear Seath has been hoarding the results of all the taxes he’s been levying for generations, and the treasury has plenty to weather an emergency or two, and enough money for a few adventurers to retire on.”

It looks like Quil might object to that, and then she smiles, rueful. “And if I know Valira at all, she’ll be going around casting Plant Growth on any region that’s had troubles, and within two years Tyne’s going to have so many crops we’ll be sick to death of vegetables.”

“Just so.”

“And we can come back, of course, but—don’t you and Terry want to be alone sometimes?”

Phi is determined that if the time comes to have a conversation about what they want, all three of them should be there, and she’s even more determined not to do it yet. Quil isn’t anywhere close to believing they might care for her, especially if she’s asking questions like that. Still, Phi wants to. Lying to Quil, even if only by omission, isn’t what she wants either. “We’re alone plenty,” she says, skirting the possibilities as best she can.

“You had a whole year without him. You must still miss him.”

Of course Quil, who parted herself from her family on purpose, who’s just recently found and lost her sister again, understands that you don’t stop missing someone when you see them again. You stop missing them when you feel that you fit together well again, when the time between you no longer seems like an insurmountable obstacle. She and Terry aren’t there yet, however much they’re both trying. “I do,” says Phi, because here she can be honest. “But that doesn’t mean that I want to start missing you.”

For a while, Quil is silent. It goes long enough that Phi glances over her shoulder to see Quil gamely trotting along behind her, wincing with nearly every step. Perhaps if they come with Terry, they should bring a wagon and anything Gari wants to sell off so Quil doesn’t have to ride. “I’m still right here,” Quil says eventually, and she sounds puzzled.

“Exactly.” It’s all Phi can really say to that without explaining more than she should, so she rides on, and listens to Quil sigh behind her as they go another mile down the road.

Quil is downwind, but Phi wonders if she would smell magic on the air if she fell back.

*

Letters arrive from Valira and from Cordelia, and leave Quil looking for sympathy from Terry at their dinner table. “Did you feel like this whenever you got a letter from her?” she asks, waving a hand in Phi’s direction. “Just enough to terrify you without any reassuring details?”

“Well, the fact that she was alive to write me was always at least a little reassuring,” says Terry, but he’s smiling. “Yes, though. I hated the letters as much as I loved them, for everything she didn’t have time to write about.”

Phi smiles at him, looking up from Valira’s letter, which is one paragraph, painstakingly written, with a pressed flower enclosed and the announcement that they dealt with a small band of Seath’s loyalists on their way to the keep but that they’ve been in serious conference with Arfil and Idilus ever since. “If I’d written you everything, we wouldn’t have gotten nearly as much done.”

Quil shakes Cordelia’s letter, which is two closely-written sheets full of dramatic underlines and exclamation points, all Phi can understand of the Infernal she used to write it. “She cut a man’s arm off with an axe! How am I supposed to respond to that?”

Terry’s smile is verging into a grin. “Well, I usually said something like ‘I’m very glad you’re still alive, and it sounds like you’re getting very dangerous,” and then sometimes something about sweeping me off my feet, but that’s not relevant with a sister. I don’t know, though—Phi, was I saying the right things?”

Phi can’t help but laugh. “On the road, anything was right, as long as I was hearing from you. I’m sure it’s the same with Cordelia, Quil. Tell her you’re glad she’s alive and to make sure she cleans that axe thoroughly, no good rusting it so soon.”

“Does being a weapons expert rob everyone of sense?” Quil asks the ceiling, being outnumbered in the room and the hold. “I miss Valira.”

Valira’s letter includes a grim and brief _I dealt with most of them,_ so being a spellcaster doesn’t help her there, but Quil isn’t in the mood to deal with grimness. If she needs to treat the adventuring with exasperation instead, Phi isn’t going to force her to be more serious. She turns to Terry instead. “Do you think I’m robbed of sense?”

“Hard to tell.” He refills Quil’s cup of ale and relaxes back in his chair. “I use weapons too, after all. We may have to apply to Allan for arbitration here.”

Quil takes a drink, puts down her letter, and huffs out a laugh. It’s grudging, but it’s better than nothing. “No, let’s not bother Allan. We can just agree that having power, with weapons or magic, makes everyone run mad a little, and it’s my luck that Cordelia’s version of that is enjoying herself.” She sighs at the letter. “Far too much.”

“Imagine poor Valira having to listen to Trilli’s enthusiasms about the fights after they’ve already fought them,” Phi offers.

“Even better—imagine Star giving reports to Arfil of all these things, knowing he hosted her god for a while,” says Terry, who finds Star hilarious and would have adopted her in an instant if he thought she would allow it.

Quil lets out an ungainly snort of laughter, and then Terry breaks, and Phi puts Valira’s letter down and gives into the merriment, the first joke that’s truly felt like one in a long time, however weak it might be.

Laughter begets laughter, especially when Terry is liberal with the ale and not even subtle about using it to bring them out of themselves a little. They spend hours giggling over some things that are hardly funny at all and others that are very funny indeed, Terry’s stories about his travels, Quil’s about Cordelia as a child before they fell through the portals, Phi about the time after they ousted Crestmaker, when they were all giddy with freedom and inclined to make terrible but entertaining choices. They all stay tipsy enough to laugh and sober enough to avoid the pitfalls everywhere in their lives.

Quil sleeps sprawled on their spare room bed, too tired to crawl under the covers, and Phi shoos Terry off to their own and watches her there for just a moment, like she’s on watch on the road again, checking that Quil is safe. She is. They all are. They’re even laughing again.

In the morning, Quil seems lighter, teasing Mrs. Whiskers with a length of string, eating toasted bread, Cordelia’s letter tucked away in her pocket. She lets Terry drape a shawl around her shoulders and Phi sit next to her on the floor, companionable and familiar, and there’s no magic in the air, no panic in her eyes.

_Not yet,_ Phi thinks as she finally excuses herself to spend some time with Lanra, Quil already making excuses about writing a letter for Cordelia behind her. _Not yet, but maybe sooner than I thought._

*

In the coming weeks, Quil spends another night on their spare bed with the excuse of alcohol, and then another five with no excuse at all, until it becomes understood that when they invite her for dinner, she’ll stay the night.

With Quil there, Phi sleeps a little easier, and thinks it helps Quil too. After a year, Phi sleeps sounder knowing that she’s safe. The mornings make more sense when Quil is awake and drinking tea and brushing her hair in front of Phi’s hearth, and to her relief, Terry seems to agree. Where Phi and Terry haven’t quite found their rhythm again in the mornings, too many apologetic notes left when one or the other has a dawn shift on the walls, too many awkward silences while they reckon with a year of absence, Quil makes things easier. She becomes a vessel for messages, someone Phi can talk to with Terry listening about their year away so he can hear without her tripping over her words, and the resident expert at brewing a delicious cup of tea. She’s someone to fuss over, and laugh with, and Phi isn’t surprised at how easily Terry slips into love with her, much as he isn’t saying it even to Phi yet.

Not every night or day is an easy or good one. Letters from Cordelia tend to send Quil off in a temper born of worry. Letters from Valira, especially as she leaves the girls to head to Norene, tend to leave both of them sober and quiet, reading between the lines about how lonely she finds herself. There are still nights where Phi sits up, hardly able to sleep, and nights where she wakes to hear Quil in the throes of a nightmare. There are evenings where Terry will start a story about his travels with Lanra and trail off, remembering that whatever scrape they were involved in led to something worse.

Quil still avoids magic in front of them.

On the evenings when a group of them meets in the dining room, sometimes Allan will talk to Quil, interested and enthusiastic, about spells he’s seen her cast in the safe area he’s set up for them. She’s shown him most of what she knows, from what Phi can tell, though Allan sulks over her staunch refusal to cast Meteor Storm anywhere near Fairpoint Hold. Others mention her magic too—Iain thanks her for a Blight more powerful than he could cast for a field of an invasive shrub, Tyler asks if she’ll be able to come back and cleanse his laboratory with Prestidigitation again, and Gari teases that Quil will never lift anything that Mage Hand might do as well.

Terry spills most of a bottle of wine on the floor, and Quil cheerfully helps him scrub it up. Quil complains that she’s too lazy to get up and shut a window, and then does it instead of casting Mage Hand. She doesn’t use Fire Bolt to start the fire when Phi invites her to.

“It’s a good sign, isn’t it?” Terry asks when she brings it up, frustrated, on one of their increasingly rare nights alone. “In its own way, anyway. She’s having strong feelings about us—or about you.”

“When’s the last time she cast a spell around you alone?” Phi asks, frowning a little. Terry and Quil don’t have as much time alone together as she would like, but they do have some time. He checks her hive with her, now that she’s built something more permanent than a skep out in the field, and she thinks they take walks sometimes when she’s busy, and that Terry often cleans his armor in whatever room she happens to be in, unless she’s with Allan.

Terry frowns right back, considering the question. “It’s not something I pay attention to,” he says at last. “I don’t know if I’d notice a quick Prestidigitation, for instance. But that I’ve noticed? Maybe not since she opened that pit up.”

“It might be encouraging for our hopes, but I still don’t like it. Magic is so much a part of Quil.” Phi hesitates, but the worst has to be said. “What if, even if the best happens and she says she loves us too and is willing to try something a little difficult, the surges keep being so frequent and dangerous? Love is a strong emotion, and that’s the trouble. What if, by choosing us, she loses the ability to trust her magic as much as she ever can?”

Terry reaches for her hand, and she lets him take it. “I don’t know. Only she can tell us, because the impression I get is that only she knows how her magic works. But she’s got her soul back now, which is a very strange thing to say indeed, so maybe things will settle. And maybe when she trusts us, and trusts our feelings and her own, that will settle too.”

“I hope so. I just hate that we can’t ask without it all coming out, and I think if we tried to ask so soon, the resulting surge might set the whole hold aflame.”

“Let’s hope not,” says Terry, and changes the subject.

*

Two weeks later, the three of them get in the hold’s best cart and drive toward the largest town nearby. It takes a little convincing to get Quil to agree to come, and a little more to convince half of Phi’s brothers to agree to stay, but they set out on a beautiful day, Terry driving the cart and Phi and Quil in the back of it, making sure none of their trade goods fall out.

“Why didn’t we buy horses at any point in that whole miserable year?” Quil wonders after a while. She’s awkwardly reclined on the cart on one of the bags of goose down Iain has provided for sale, staring up at the sky. “We’d have gone everywhere so much faster.”

“Because a lot of the misery involved being on boats, or underwater, or on inhospitable mountains, or in the Demon Web Pits or the Underdark. Valira’s sheep would have eaten our horses immediately.”

Quil laughs a little at that. Valira’s letters have dried up after she arrived in Norene and let them know she was entering the Underdark, but Kithri’s regular Sending says Valira has most of a flock and is collecting a last few wayward sheep and making arrangements for them. There’s still no word about what she plans to do with them, if they’ll be left in Norene or brought to Tyne, but Phi imagines they’ll find out without much warning. “I suppose you’re right. We’re lucky the horses didn’t die when the goblins attacked outside Windell and we could just leave them in Hylene.”

“Keene might have drawn the line at horses as well as rats,” says Phi, and then they’re both laughing. It’s happening more, now, the sudden levity, flashes of memory that are mostly only funny in contrast to everything else they went through.

Terry grins over his shoulder at them, driving easily along and listening attentively. He never seems jealous or annoyed when they start laughing, just waits to see if he’ll be brought in on the joke. He’s heard about the rats, though, and about Windell as well, especially since he’s been there himself, so there’s not much more to say, and she just smiles at him, glad for the sunlight and the company and the time for just the three of them.

“Well, if we’re talking about horses,” he says as the laughter fades, back to looking at the road, “I should tell you about the horse breeders we met in the west. They had a stud book older than Tyne, according to them, and were more snobbish than any of the dragons you’ve talked about, Seath included.”

It’s a good story, or Terry is just a good storyteller, and he draws it out in a way that gets them all the way to town, where they have an hour of business with the broker Gari contracts with and then plenty of time to wander, buying food from street vendors and trinkets just for the joy of it. Terry insists on buying Phi a shawl she lingers over in a shop window, and then it seems to be a race for who can buy presents for the others the quickest, the kind of fun shopping they never had a chance to indulge in on the road. Quil produces her gifts with a shy smile, and takes them with blushes. Phi thinks she smells ozone when Terry tucks a silk flower behind Quil’s ear, but it fades quickly and Quil doesn’t mention it, so Phi doesn’t either.

In the evening, they find an inn with connecting rooms free, order dinner and enough ale to get them pleasantly loose, and sit in the common room. They get a few odd looks, but it’s a town close enough to the border that the population is fairly mixed, so people move on quick enough, and it helps that Terry ends up charming the whole room and playing a game of cards with some of the locals, fleecing them all with a grin on his face that keeps them from taking issue with it.

Quil is nearly asleep in her mug by the end of the evening, but she’s still smiling as they go up the stairs. “This has been nice,” she says, sounding startled about it. “It’s been so long since there was a day like this.”

Their trip weeks ago might have counted, but it’s encouraging that she says it now, when it’s all three of them. “I’ve missed it,” says Phi, even though she doesn’t think they’ve had a day like the ones Quil means together. “And I’m glad you were here for it.”

“Me too,” she says, though she looks a little confused for a moment until Terry interrupts by ushering her into her room. The innkeeper left the connecting door between their rooms open, and Quil doesn’t go to close it, just slings her bag on the chair in a corner and then slings herself onto the bed with a groan. “We don’t have to leave early in the morning, right?”

Terry laughs. “I think we can safely set out after lunch and have plenty of daylight to get home.”

“After lunch it is,” says Quil, with apparently no intention of getting up.

Much as they aren’t talking about this courtship, there are some things Phi can’t allow without asking about them. “Door open?” she asks, and Terry nods at her, so at least she isn’t alone in it.

Quil props herself up on her elbows and frowns a little. “Don’t you want privacy?”

“Not from you, tonight at least,” says Terry, not uncomfortable at all. “It’s nice to have company.”

And even if they weren’t courting her, this is Phi’s first night away from home since she came home, and if she wakes in the night, Quil’s presence is going to be comforting. Hopefully Quil agrees. Phi waits for her to think about it, which she does, her frown growing deeper for a moment before it dissolves into mere confusion. “If you like, then. But don’t be afraid to get up and close it if you need to.”

“So can you,” says Phi, and knows it’s a little too serious at the end of the day, but Quil may appreciate the offer, when she’s awake enough to remember it.

“I’m not getting out of bed until morning,” she says, waving a hand and falling onto her back again. “Late morning.”

“Understood,” says Terry, with a grin. “Come on, Phi, let’s let her get some rest. Just yell if you need anything, Quil.”

“I will,” she says, and she still sounds puzzled, but Phi believes her.

*

When Phi wakes in the morning, the door is still open, and Quil is still sleeping, and Phi allows herself one quick peek through it before she closes it long enough that she and Terry can change for the day.

By the time she opens it again, Quil is awake, yawning herself to sitting. It’s rare she sleeps in, even when she’s exhausted, but when she lets herself, it tends to take her a while to wake up, so she just grunts when Phi greets her and tells her she’ll close the door so Quil can get dressed. All is quiet on her side of the door for a few minutes, and then there’s the creaking of the bed and the floorboards that mean she’s getting ready for the day.

She’s still yawning by the time she opens the door a little while later, but she’s awake enough to smile. “Did I embarrass myself terribly last night? I didn’t forget anything, I don’t think, but I was very tired.”

“Nothing at all,” Terry assures her. “We’ve got a few hours before we need to be on our way. Shall we have breakfast in the common room and then go see if Gari’s agent has anything to send back with us?”

That gets them all moving down to the common room, where they’re serving some kind of hearty porridge and sausages, and where the innkeeper is a lot more respectful and hesitant than she was the night before.

“Is it true?” she asks when she comes to top up Terry’s coffee.

They exchange looks, Quil straightening from her tired slump and Terry pulling his mug back once it’s full, mouth pulling with a frown. “Is what true?” Phi asks.

“One of the men in the common room last night, he says he met you in Hylene last year and then heard you went on to …” She lowers her voice. “To kill the king. The dragon, I mean. Is that true?”

Quil’s stricken expression is more than enough to give them away, but Phi still hesitates. Gari, she thinks, would like to trumpet their triumph from Fairpoint Hold’s walls, tell all of Tyne who killed the monster and where they make their home. It would make trading easier on her, truly restore all of the hold’s lost reputation from Crestmaker. Even so, Phi doesn’t know if she wants the kind of awe on the innkeeper’s face following her around for the rest of her life. She did what needed to be done. That doesn’t give her a right to anything but her own peaceful life. “I didn’t have the honor, no,” says Terry when the silence stretches long enough that the innkeeper must guess but neither Phi nor Quil has anything to say. “But they did.”

She makes a startled sound and slops a bit of coffee from her pot to the floor. “I should make something nicer for breakfast! You heroes and all, and I didn’t know!”

“There’s no need,” says Phi, as firmly as she can. “This is just fine for us, and we didn’t come out looking for recognition.”

“To think, the saviors of the world in my inn,” she says, ignoring Phi entirely, with a businesswoman’s gleam in her eye that must be temptation to make a great fuss over them. “Will you be staying again, ma’ams? Sir?”

Quil looks about ready to take to her heels, and Phi can’t say she feels much different. “Next time we’re in town, most likely,” Terry says, easily enough, knocking his foot into hers under the table. “We’ve just been doing an errand for her sister, is all.”

“We’ve heard so many wild things about the saviors of Tyne! We heard you killed a goddess!”

Phi shovels a spoonful of porridge into her mouth in hopes that it gives her an excuse not to talk. It’s the coward’s way out, but she’d thought them safely anonymous, and this isn’t a battle, not a place she can take out her sword and fight them out of the room. This is Terry’s kind of thing far more than hers, but he didn’t travel with them, and from the way he’s biting his lip, he’s not sure how much they’re comfortable with him saying. “No mortal can really kill a goddess,” says Quil at last, to Phi’s surprise, in the indulgent tone that says gossip got out of hand, leaving out that they certainly killed her mortal form.

The innkeeper deflates a little. “No, I suppose not. But still, a dragon! And goodness knows what else, nobody really seems to know. You could tell me!” She perks up again. “The common room would be full for weeks.”

“There are a lot of secrets that aren’t ours to tell,” says Quil, just as serious as she was with Lolth’s handmaiden. She even leans in a little, conspiratorial. “But Seath was just as bad as anyone might be saying, I’ll tell you that.”

“Oh, I knew that.” She waves a hand. “Anyone trying to run a business with his taxes and his army wandering through without paying for ale or beds would tell you that, and my great-gran said she saw him once, or what we thought was this ones grandpa, and that he was no good. Would have been happy enough to have you kill him even if he weren’t a dragon.”

Phi has to suppress an inappropriate urge to laugh at that, and knows she’s sitting around uselessly and letting Quil and Terry take care of everything, but she can’t think of anything to say. “Hopefully whoever’s up next will do much better,” says Terry.

“It’s not one of you? There were two more, weren’t there?”

Phi does laugh, then, just imagining the thought of Kithri or Valira on a throne. Neither she nor Quil wants it, but if forced, they might manage it. Kithri and Valira both would blaze through their enemies within a week and then freeze, with no desire to deal with diplomacy or the daily work of ruling. “No, none of us thought that gave us any right to the throne,” she says, because her laugh has all of them looking at her. It’s true, though Keene of all people was the one to point out right after that usually the one who kills the king becomes the next ruler. “We just want a quiet life, now.”

“Of course,” she says, and gives them a broad wink. “Two lovely ladies and a fine gentleman, there are worse quiet lives to have. I wouldn’t want a throne either, with that waiting for me at home!”

And then, understanding something that is and isn’t true, she wanders away to her other tables, all of whom are staring by now. Phi gives her a chance to walk away and then turns to Quil, who’s blushing to the point that anyone could see it, not just someone who knows her well. A second later, there’s the smell of ozone, but no effect Phi can see. In some of their evenings, she’s gotten Quil to relax enough that she admits that when nothing seems to happen, it’s often that something would be happening, if they were in a battle, but when they aren’t, the strange magic goes to waste and dissipates into the ether. “I should correct her,” Quil says when none of them can manage anything.

“You should not,” says Terry, warm and firm. “What would she say? Besides, we are two lovely ladies and a gentleman trying to live a quiet life. That’s the core of it, and if she gossips about something a bit scandalous, well, she’ll have blown this into a story that will keep her common room hopping for weeks within an hour, if I’m a judge.”

“Speaking of which, perhaps we should eat fast and leave.” Phi nods at the rest of the room. “Nobody is going to be discreet about this, and if we don’t want a dozen more conversations like that one, we should try to get ahead of the gossip.”

That gets them all eating quickly, but even so, for the rest of the morning, it feels like the town is whispering about them. Phi’s instinct from the road means that she puts Quil between them, but Quil looks desperately uncomfortable about it and lags behind as she catches the whispers about them, no doubt worried that the assumptions are about their relationship rather than about killing Seath.

“We should go,” says Terry when they’ve seen Gari’s agent and received the information and payment they need for her. “No use waiting around to be gawked at. If you two go to the wagon, I’ll use my relative anonymity to buy us a picnic lunch, and we’ll leave a little earlier than expected, that’s all.”

Quil’s sigh of utter relief proves that Terry was right to offer, and Phi kisses him on the cheek and sends him off. She walks with Quil, and the two of them alone draw even more looks. It will be a while before either of them can come back to town.

“You would have said something, on the road,” says Quil after a little while, where they’re only a few turns from where they left their wagon and horses overnight. “If anyone thought you were anything but faithful to Terry.”

It’s a fair question, and a hard one to answer without giving everything away, and from the tightness of Quil’s posture, she’s still not ready for that. “I think it makes a difference that he’s here now,” she finally says, thinking through it. “And there’s a difference between a stranger making an assumption because we’re close and a friend thinking I might not be faithful if temptation came up.”

“I don’t understand it. It’s one of the first real things you told any of us, that you love him. I wouldn’t—I don’t want you to think that I don’t respect that. I do, and if there’s a way I can stop people assuming, I’m happy to figure it out.”

“I don’t mind,” says Phi, and could almost curse herself for making this harder on herself, but she couldn’t have known, while she was traveling, how much she would come to want it, and that Terry would want it too. “There are worse assumptions for people to make, and sometimes denying things only makes people believe them more. If you mind, we can correct people, but I don’t. It’s the truth.”

Quil bites her lip and thinks for a minute before she speaks, so they’re almost to the wagon. “If you’re sure, I don’t mind. Like you said, people might believe it anyway.”

_If only you would,_ Phi thinks, but smiles. “I’m sure, yes. And if you like, you can ask Terry too, but he’ll say the same.”

“I don’t understand you two,” she says, and sighs with relief when their wagon comes into sight.

Phi mulls over her answer to that while they pay for the horses’ lodging, grateful for the chance to talk to a stranger who hasn’t yet ascertained their identities and will talk sense and cheerfully fleece her out of extra money for horse feed. When they’ve got the wagon, they climb in, both in the front instead of one in the back even though it’s a bit of a squeeze. “What about us confuses you?” she finally asks.

“A lot of things.” Quil sits forward and sighs. “But I already said what confuses me most, really. That you want to spend time like this when you’re so newly back to Terry, and that you spent a whole year protesting the assumption that you might not be faithful and now you don’t mind.”

“There’s a difference between being unfaithful and welcoming someone new. I don’t mind that assumption as much. And I always want to spend time with you.”

“That doesn’t make it less confusing,” says Quil, but there’s a notch between her brows, and Phi is beginning to wonder if she understands more than she thinks she does.

*

Leaving town early means they get to spend a long time sitting in a field having a picnic. Some bees find Quil as they always do, something about her calling even strange ones to herself, and Terry laughs and tucks a flower behind her ear, claiming she may as well feed them while they visit her.

To Phi’s surprise, Quil responds by putting a flower in Phi’s hair in turn, and then in Terry’s. “Then they’ll come to you too,” she explains.

Phi’s spent plenty of time around flowers and around bees, and they only rarely land on her, especially when Quil is there. Today, though, like Quil’s blessing is as clear to them as the scent of nectar, she finds them crawling on her and Terry nearly as much as on Quil herself. Their feet are a strange tickle on Phi’s hands and arms, and one lands on her lips like the echo of a kiss before flying away.

She catches Quil looking after that, but after just a second, Quil turns to pluck one from Terry’s sleeve before he can lift a bite of food to his mouth. “She might not have liked that movement,” she says, and holds her hand up, smiling at the bee crawling across her hand. “I’ve never seen this kind. The wild bees are different everywhere, did you know?”

“No, but you should tell us,” says Terry, and for once, Quil doesn’t demur, doesn’t say they would be bored by it. She talks, instead, and has to be reminded to eat, and when they finish, she’s not the one to suggest they get back on the road. Instead, she reclines in the grass while the air hums with wings around them, and Phi loves her impossibly.

From the look on Terry’s face before he finally admits they need to leave to make it home by dinner, he feels the same.

*

Phi knows Lanra too well to think he would let it all go without mentioning it. She’s not surprised, a day or two later, that he maneuvers an excuse to go for a walk with her alone while Quil is with Allan and Terry is on duty.

She still makes him mention it first, because she doesn’t need to encourage his well-meaning nosiness.

“Are you all happy?” he begins, and that’s better than she expected. She was prepared for _Are you sure?_ but if he’s asking her at all, he must know that she is.

“Not yet. But we’re working on it. Trying to find a way that she’ll believe in what we want, mostly.”

Lanra hums, and then laughs. “Only you, Phi—not just Terry, the nicest man you’ll ever meet, but Quil, the most powerful sorcerer in living memory. If I had your luck, I’d never stop gambling.”

She would argue, but in the important ways, he isn’t wrong. Phi has had more trials than many, has had to prepare for Crestmaker’s death twice, chased a quest around the world with the constant terror of the high stakes at her heels, and has lost more than she cares to tally up some days. But she has her brothers, and Terry, and Quil, and Valira and Kithri are close to hand. She’s safe and knows that if danger comes again, she can protect the people she loves. “It isn’t settled yet,” she warns him nonetheless. “Quil isn’t ready to believe it yet, and even if she does, she worries that her power might hurt people she loves.”

“And you know nothing about that at all,” he says, wry and pointed, but doesn’t press more. “And how secret is it? I ask, you see, because if there’s going to be a betting pool …”

Phi rolls her eyes and shoulders him, since it’s what he’s expecting. “If there’s a betting pool, you know who’s winning, so there’s no point.” She hesitates. “Terry never said, and no one else did either, if anyone warned him off hurting me. If anyone did—don’t, with Quil. You can pass that on.”

Lanra stops and gives her a serious look. “Anyone you trust to let near enough that you’re thinking of this, we know they know to be careful with you. And Quil is one of us now anyway. I just wanted to know that it’s going to end well.”

“I can’t promise that, but we’re going to try to make sure that it does.”

“I’ll trust that, then. I’d just like all of you to have the chance to be happy.”

Phi walks for a little before she responds to that. “And you? Are you happy? I haven’t had much time to ask about your travels, and it seems like you and Terry had plenty of fun, but are you settled now? Or ready to go out again? Looking for something domestic like I’m starting to build?”

Lanra shrugs. “You and Kal have both ended up lucky. I don’t know if domestic is my style, but I suppose we’ll have to see.”

After so many years, Phi is starting to imagine her future, farther and farther out every day. Maybe it’s time to turn those imaginings to her brothers, if they ask her. Crestmaker left his marks on all of them, and they’re an exclusive, wary group. Phi has opened their circle up by accident, but maybe it’s time to reach out, now that Tyne and the world are a little safer. She can’t do it on her brothers’ behalf, and she’ll have to talk to Gari about it, but she can’t rest forever. She’s grateful for it now, but to do it forever isn’t in her nature. Finding some way to reach out might be the purpose she’ll need. “Let me know if you need help making your own luck,” she offers. The rest of the thoughts are too new to share yet, even with Lanra.

“I may just take you up on it,” he says to her surprise. “And in the meantime, maybe you and I should take a trip out one of these days, to do some gambling and see if your luck holds there.”

She’s not ready to spend a night without Terry yet, but maybe in a month or two she will be. “I’ll have to think about it—I’m out of practice.”

“Great, then I’ll win,” he says, and laughs.

When Phi asks a question about his travels, a little ashamed that she’s only heard Terry’s best stories and far fewer of Lanra’s, he answers honestly, and she’s grateful for the chance to listen and not just share what her own year away looked like.

It’s one step closer to truly being home, she decides, and doesn’t mind that the route he picks gets them back to the hold late for dinner.

*

More than half of Valira’s season has gone when a letter comes telling them she’s on the coast of Tyne. _There’s a farm, and we’re setting up,_ she writes, her handwriting as unpracticed as ever. _Turns out Kalon and Frog stole a lot of treasure from Mezzon during the revolution, so we’ve got the money for it. If you like, come visit._

Instead of directions, there’s the name of a nearby town nobody at the hold has heard of, too small to be on any maps, and a painstaking recreation of the nearby coastline, no doubt viewed from above while Valira was a hawk so she could show them where she is.

Maps from above, unfortunately, end up quite different to maps made on the ground, and Phi has to enlist Gari, Allan, and Quil all to look at Gari’s map of Tyne and find the part of the coastline where Valira has pitched up. It’s south of Hylene, a place Phi really only knows as a scattering of farmland and fishing villages.

“Aren’t druids supposed to be good at finding their way in nature?” Allan asks, when a Sending hasn’t clarified anything further.

“She never gets lost,” says Quil. “But that doesn’t mean she can give directions.”

Gari snorts. “Wayfinder by name but not by nature, then? But the real question is if you’re going. And if this very strange sheep farm is going to be selling wool, and at what price.”

Phi smiles at her. “Is that your way of saying you’d like to invest?”

“It can’t hurt to get involved in some business enterprises, since we’re hopefully at the beginning of a time of peace. A piece of the business in honor of the peace of the land, say.”

Quil hides her smile by turning back to Valira’s map, and the mark she’s made where the farm is. “I’d like to go. I don’t know a circle very near it, but I could get us as far as Seath’s keep, and it should only be a week from there, if we’re reading the map right.”

“Could we steal Terry for that long?” Phi asks Gari, mostly as a formality. Gari has to balance the needs of the hold and the wider world, but she isn’t like to deny Phi much right now. “That long there and then back, when Quil hasn’t got the circle working here yet?”

Gari waves a hand. “By all means. You’re there on a business venture for me, aren’t you? And I couldn’t part you. Planning on taking anyone else?”

Phi shrugs, but she’s aware of the way Quil’s shoulders tighten a little, and Gari and Allan are both observant enough to see it as well, so they’ll know her reasons for saying “If they want to come, certainly, but I think it might be easier at the farm if it’s mostly people the sheep have already met, with Terry along to try them with a stranger.”

“By all means, let’s make things easier for the sheep,” says Allan, but he’s smiling. “Are you going to fetch Valira back? Iain’s got plans that require another druid around, I think.”

“We’re hoping to, but she may need more time to set the farm up.” Phi smiles back at him. “I’ll tell her you were asking after her, though.”

“You’d better,” he says, and offers his arm to Quil. “And you’d better tell me what maintenance to do on your circle so you won’t lose all your progress making it permanent by not casting every day. Come on, no time like the present and if I know my sister at all, you’ll all be on your way within three days and you’ll hardly have time to show me once everyone finds out you’re going.”

Quil gives Phi a searching look, but Phi smiles and sends her on her way, in case Gari has more to say to her. Allan thinks she does, if he removed Quil so neatly from the room when there’s probably still planning to do. He’s always been able to read Gari’s cues better than the rest of them. “Anything you want me to keep an eye on?” she inquires.

“Always,” says Gari, and sits down at her desk. “Especially if you’re really going through the king’s keep now that your wizards are gone. I know they’ve installed some sort of intermediary government, but it’s still finding its feet, and if it’s unstable, I need to know. Nobody’s likely to invade this corner of Tyne if we let it be known discreetly that we’re host to the dragon slayers, but that’s no reason to be careless.”

The work is never done, but Phi wouldn’t want it to be, either. “I’ll keep my ears open. And if you’ve got any letters for the government, I’m happy to play courier, too.”

“I’ll take you up on it, even if I have to write fast.” Gari hesitates and then leans forward. “I don’t know all of what sent Valira away, but I heard the edges of things, at least. Enough to offer—she should know there’s certainly room enough for one more person here.”

Gari always does know more than she lets on, and Phi nods in acknowledgment of that even as she wonders what she can say to it. “I think she’ll appreciate the offer, whether or not she brings him to life.”

Most times, Gari doesn’t let even them see past her cheer and cleverness, but now she does, letting Phi see how weary she is, how heavily responsibility weighs on her even if the weight is welcome. “It seems impossible to me that it’s such an easy question to ask, that she could try it without worrying about the expense if he declined, but if the option is there … if I could bring our dead back, or at least give them the chance, I would.”

Phi takes a moment to miss Ky desperately, to think of Len and Ronan’s faces when they talk about Samar, who she hardly knew. She hasn’t mentioned them to Valira. Sometimes the staff terrifies her, with how easily it overcomes death. But if anyone deserves that second chance, it’s her brothers, cut down too soon. They could be born into a different life, one with less danger and much more hope. “I can ask her,” she says. “She would be willing. But I think we should all talk about it.”

“We all will, then. Maybe not too soon, but not too long from now, either.” Gari gives her half a smile. “Seath broke the world long before he tried to become Tiamat. Maybe we can’t undo all those deaths. Maybe we _shouldn’t_ , because I don’t want it all to become less real. But if we have the ability to offer people chances without cost, I can’t see the harm in that.”

Sobak, even when she told him his death was coming in the Tower of the Cerulean Sky, accepted its inevitability, but she misses him now with a pang she hasn’t in a long while. He might speak against it, and say that sacrifice has its rewards, that life is a precious gift but he’s happy enough in whatever plane of existence he lives on. Then again, he might take the chance. She thinks, with something almost like amusement, that he and Ewhoza might share a certain warrior’s grimness. “You could ask people while we’re gone,” she suggests.

“Maybe I will.” Gari’s smile comes back, perfectly cheerful, less a mask than a determined switch. “And when you see her, tell her that if he comes back, he’ll have people who understand what it’s like to be forced to become something you never wanted to be.”

“I will,” Phi promises, and takes it as the dismissal it’s meant to be.

*

There’s no gathering at the gate when they leave, mostly because they aren’t leaving by the gate, when Quil’s magic will take them right to Seath’s keep. Gari insists they all have dinner the night before, but nobody asks to see them off the next day, and Quil sleeps in their spare room, so in the morning, all it takes is Terry saying “Are we ready?” and they don’t have many more excuses but to pack the last few things in their bags and go.

It’s been a while since they traveled by magic, and Phi braces herself for a surge, to pull herself or Terry out of the way if she needs to, and to reassure Quil, but they arrive without incident, Quil starting a yawn at Fairpoint Hold and finishing it in Seath’s keep.

By the time Phi is finished hiding her relief, there’s already a flutter of people arriving, recognizing them from Arfil’s descriptions, and making a fuss, first asking if something’s gone wrong and then wanting to show them everything that’s happened in the time since Seath was killed. Quil hides behind them, mostly, but Phi listens as much as she can, even when politics aren’t something she cares about except when they might kill her. Gari will want to know, after all, what they’re setting up.

It’s Terry, who doesn’t overawe the ministers who show up in curious ones and twos and then a swarm like bees find Quil when she arrives anywhere new, who asks most of the questions. They’re happy to talk to him, about the council Arfil set up of all the most trustworthy ministers from Seath’s old government and a few hand-picked people he wouldn’t have let near his government in a thousand years, how he told them cheerfully they could elect a monarch if they wanted but he had faith in them and went off to Erelest with Idilus.

Thus far, Phi is relieved to find, they don’t seem inclined to choose a ruler. After centuries of one king, any previous lines of succession are hopelessly muddied, and to give one person so much power so soon would only lead to unhappiness. Instead, they’ve been corresponding with Erelest about the council that runs the day-to-day affairs of the land, and with Astora about their elections.

Phi is fairly sure that they’ve forgotten that he’s her husband and not one of Seath’s killers, and she’s happy enough to share the honor, especially when Quil is keeping back.

The only time she speaks up is when the woman they’ve put in charge of restoration of all the infrastructure Seath and the tarrasque broke mentions sending off Cordelia and her friends to help with those efforts. “How dangerous do you expect them to be?” she asks, pinning the woman with a look that clearly discomfits her.

“Nothing like you went through, I imagine,” she says, with an anxious look like she doesn’t know if that’s Quil’s concern. “They’re keeping their eyes out for bandits, but mostly they’re aiding with rebuilding projects, which shouldn’t be dangerous at all, just hard labor. They seemed young.”

“Good,” says Quil, and stops terrifying the woman, though Phi is left wondering if they’re going to need to warn Michelle to stay subtle, because things are going to be very awkward if the girls attempt to take her on. She’s not worried they’ll succeed, not with Michelle’s mind for strategy, but things could get very difficult on both sides.

“Cordelia can’t be excited to be hauling rubble around instead of fighting monsters,” Phi says quietly as they leave, hurrying down the road and away from the gates at last. They left Fairpoint Hold just after breakfast, and it’s well into the afternoon by now, and they only got away through Terry’s skill at persuading people that there was no need to throw a last-minute party for them.

“She may not be, but I’m glad,” says Quil, and even seems it, shoulders relaxing the farther they get from the keep.

Terry, walking up ahead, turns around to walk backwards and grins at them. “If we’re going to convince Valira to come back, we’re going to have to warn her that there’s going to be a very excited reception at the keep, or she’ll never forgive us.”

“But if we warn her, she’ll never come back,” says Quil, but she’s smiling now. “Maybe she can turn us all into animals and we can come by stealth.”

“The last time we tried being animals and stealthy went so well for us,” says Phi, and then they’re telling the story of the Underdark, and it’s one of the ones Terry already knows well, but it still feels good to tell now that they aren’t there.

They walk down the road until the keep disappears behind a hill, and walk longer still, exchanging stories as they go, and when Phi suggests that Quil light their fire with a Fire Bolt, she does it, after a moment’s hesitation.

Teleportation Circle caused her no problems at all, but now she stiffens at one of her easier spells, and Phi can’t smell the wild magic, but she knows a surge when she sees one, even if she doesn’t recognize the results, and she’s not surprised when Quil is quiet for the rest of the evening, or when she insists on setting up her bedroll on the far side of the fire from theirs.

*

Phi misses her brothers, her home comforts, and Mrs. Whiskers, but the almost-aimless travel is its own kind of pleasant. They don’t linger, but they don’t hurry through the countryside either. They keep to the quickest road, but when another traveler tells them a village just east of the roads had trouble with the tarrasque and is having a massive house-raising, they detour and lose an afternoon as the whole village puts up the skeletons of new homes in their changed landscape. Another day Quil finds a hive of bees in the trunk of a tree and wins them some honeycomb to drip over their bread at lunch.

After the first night, Quil avoids magic with them, and Phi doesn’t mention it. Terry tests the boundary a little more, pleading for a Prestidigitation to get the dirt out of his clothes, but she shakes her head, and he doesn’t make her say no twice.

“Maybe we should tell her even if she won’t believe us,” Phi says one evening when Quil has gone down to a nearby pond to bathe, claiming that Prestidigitation is fine, but she doesn’t _feel_ clean until she’s bathed. Though Phi suspects she’ll be heating the water while she’s there, a trick she used a few times on their travels that Phi and Kithri always greeted with relief and Valira with baffled pleasure. Phi is fairly sure that the only thing Quil and Ewhoza regularly agreed on was well-heated bathwater, when he was still alive.

“Maybe,” Terry says, but he’s frowning as he turns it over. “You know her better than I do, so you’ll have a better guess at what her response will be. I don’t think we’re assuming wrong, but if she’s not ready, or she has feelings but no desire to act on them because of her magic or any other reason, my worry is that she’ll run away. To her cottage in the woods, or her mother, or Valira’s farm, and those are just the best-case scenarios.”

Phi wishes she could tell him that he’s wrong. If Quil were only thinking of her own feelings, he would be. She would be miserable, but she would stay, because she’s brave with her own feelings and hurt these days. But if they asked and she said no, she would know it would hurt them, and if for a second she thought her absence might make it better, she would be gone, and she would lose the home at Fairpoint Hold that she’s fought so hard to start building. “It’s a risk,” she admits, and hates it. Judging by the way his face falls, Terry was hoping for a denial, and she reaches for the next best thing. “We just have to be patient. It took me longer to decide to risk being with you. We’ve got all the time in the world now.”

“I know. That doesn’t make any of us less miserable waiting now, though.”

Phi puts her arm around him. “And you? Are you ready? You and Quil have had less time than me with either of you, and some of my hesitations are about you too.”

“That’s because you’re more thoughtful than any husband has a right to,” he says, and kisses her when she frowns at him for it. “I’m scared, Phi, but that doesn’t mean I’m not ready. It just means I know how important this is. Important enough to be patient for.”

It’s a good answer. The impatience is eating at Phi enough that she wonders how Terry stood it, waiting for her to catch up with him, but she can act with patience, anyway, and keep showing Quil that they care for her. If her withdrawal seems like it’s from more than just caution and disbelief, they can talk about it again, how much they want to risk her feeling obligated to leave if they push too hard.

For the moment, though, she nods and changes the subject, so there isn’t an obvious change when they hear Quil coming, and when Quil comes back, scrubbed clean and smiling, they’re in a deep discussion of how Valira is managing to provide game for a whole farm full of carnivorous sheep.

*

They reach Valira’s farm on the sixth afternoon of travel, and they stumble on it more than anything else. Phi knows, from her maps and Valira’s sketch, that they’re in the right area, but it’s not until they stop in a village for lunch that she figures out how close they are. Even that is only because a man sitting at the bar complains about “that madwoman and her uncanny sheep” in a tone of voice Phi has only heard in people who have been subjected to Valira’s attempts to talk her way out of or into something.

Within a minute, Terry has made friends with the man and half the other locals in the inn, and within five, he’s pried out directions to the farm and the locals’ grievances as well, which are mostly that Valira is odd and talks too fast to be trusted. Nobody has anything truly bad to say, just a baffled reaction to someone who makes no sense to them, and another ten minutes has Terry spinning out the tale of everything she did to save the world, and how the sheep had their own role in it.

He keeps Quil and Phi out of the story, where they’re sitting and trying not to collect notice a few tables away, but once they realize who Valira is, it doesn’t take them long to connect the two of them to the story as well, and Phi finishes her stew and bread quicker than she would like and goes outside not long after, to buy bread and butter and cheese to bring to Valira, who is probably living off jerky and hard tack and a bit of fish stolen from the sheep’s supply. She invites Quil along with a tilt of her head, and Quil shakes her head, lifting up her mostly-full bowl, so Phi goes despite a few misgivings. The least she can do is trust Quil to know what she can handle on her own.

“Sorry about that,” says Terry as she comes out of the shop selling cheese and butter. He’s smiling, and by a miracle, Quil is too, though she’s keeping close to his side like he can protect her. “I’d have stopped, but I figured the neighbors deserved an explanation.”

“And that she might have an easier time of it if they had one,” says Phi by way of thanks, and looks at Quil. “Sorry for leaving.”

Quil shakes her head. “You needed to be gone. I don’t blame you for that. It was busy in there.”

And Phi can take busyness, when it’s her brothers, or when she’s prepared, but she hasn’t yet managed to get used to people knowing her name, and beginning to know her face. She doesn’t like the attention. Then again, Quil doesn’t either. “Still, I could have stayed long enough to let you finish.”

“Terry came over as soon as he realized you were gone,” says Quil, and even smiles a little at Terry for that kindness. “I really don’t mind. And we have directions to Valira now, so maybe we should go instead of apologizing some more.”

Phi still offers her a piece of cheese as they start walking, which Quil takes with a smile and a shake of her head, but she drops it, and lets Terry lead them out of town and towards the shore instead.

*

On Tyne’s northern coasts, the land slopes gently down to the sea. Farther south, though, where Valira has chosen to settle the herd, there are bluffs, twenty or more feet tall, with only slim stretches of sand down below.

There are also signs of the tarrasque’s passage: stands of trees flattened, and large holes, some of them filling in with ponds. The land gets lusher and richer as they walk, though, and Phi isn’t surprised when they reach the edge of Valira’s land, marked by a well-built stone wall she must have put up with magic, considering how little time she’s had and how far it stretches.

“They said at the inn there’s no break in the wall,” Terry says when they all stand there staring at it. It’s taller than the average stone wall, but not so tall they can’t get over it easily. Just tall enough, Phi suspects, to keep sheep from jumping. “Want a hand up, Quil?”

Quil scowls at the wall like it’s personally offended her. “I’ll Blink across, thank you.”

“Very sensible,” Terry assures her, and turns a grin on Phi. “You first, though. If there’s a sheep right on the other side planning to take a bite out of us, you’ll probably be able to hold it off longest.”

Phi rolls her eyes, but there’s no reason not to go first, and she’s impatient to see this place Valira has built, and to see if it’s somewhere Valira will want to stay, so she can prepare herself. To show off a little, she backs up a few steps to take a run at the wall and leaps up easily to crouch at the top, looking out over the land.

It’s green with thick, lush grass, and the only structures Phi can see are a few straw huts huddled up against the wall, nothing permanent yet. There are a few boulders strewn around the fields, and a few trees, wind-blown from being so close to the shore, but mostly it’s a massive pasture, as much land behind the walls as Fairpoint Hold owns, if she’s estimating right. It’s crescent-shaped, and the curve at the center is ragged, and Phi can almost see the path the tarrasque took, shearing off the edge of the cliff. The beach below the bluff’s edge must be covered in rubble.

Scattered across the field are white shapes, three or four dozen at a glance, some of them already trotting with interest in their direction, and Phi jumps down to their level, listening to Terry grunt behind her as he gets on top of the wall himself. “She’s done well for herself,” he says, and jumps down next to her a second before Quil Blinks to their side of the wall, smug and then curious, looking around and taking stock the way Phi just did.

The first sheep to reach them approaches at a predator’s prowl, not attacking but ready to, as they must do occasionally with predators. Phi puts her hands up in what she hopes is a universal gesture of peace. “I’m a friend of Valira’s,” she says, and hopes some of that translates.

Some of it must, because she turns and bleats, and then the next nearest sheep, and then the next, and the whole herd sets up some kind of relay that ends in Valira running out of one of the straw huts. She spots them a second later, before Phi can call out for her, and takes off at an easy jog, covering the space between them before the rest of them can move forward around the growing crowd of sheep.

When Valira arrives, Phi takes quick stock of her, and to her relief finds her smiling, lean from the road but not as gaunt as she was in those last bad days, trailing a length of yarn that’s half-wound around her hand behind her. She says a few sharp words in Elvish to the sheep, who disperse with a few displeased noises, and then grins at them. “I didn’t think you’d be here this soon! Come on, I’ll show you where you can put your things down and we can go talk on the beach.”

Valira plays the hostess with awkward grace, earnestly describing every part of the farm, from walls to the loom that’s the newest installation in one of the huts, as belonging to the sheep, and introduces several local youths as well, bending over spindles or carding wool, confiding that a few others are taking care of the flock of chickens they’re keeping to diversify the meat supply. It’s a breezy, comprehensive tour, and she doesn’t really stop talking until they’re picking their way down the path to the beach, where there don’t seem to be any extra rocks at all. Phi should have known. No doubt Valira built her stone wall out of them.

Quil is the one to say, when they’ve reached the shore: “And _you_ , Valira?” By now, they all know that when Valira talks most, she says least. “You left looking for something. Did you find it?”

“I kept my promises,” says Valira, and shucks off her boots to put her feet in the ocean, though the water must be cold. “The farm will be able to run by itself soon, at least for a while. Vesta is helping. Kalon Bel is thinking about coming across the ocean, since the impression I get is that he made the Underdark too hot to hold him. Though he and Frog are still trying to make sure all the sheep that decided not to surface are taken care of. Turns out several cities a lot more pleasant than Mezzon are more than happy to take them in, and at least one has an underground river with some interesting kinds of fish in it.”

“That doesn’t tell us anything about how you are,” Phi points out.

Valira’s smile goes rueful. “And avoidance means only bad things, I suppose. I don’t know how I am, though, that’s why I’m not answering. I’ve liked getting to do this, and I’ve missed Fairpoint Hold. If it weren’t for there, maybe I’d want to stay here, but as it is, I’ll just have to visit.”

“You could always move the sheep inland,” says Terry, always interested in giving people everything they could want. “We’re not far from a river ourselves. Not as many fish, but certainly a few.”

She shrugs. “They like the salt water fishes. And sometimes a jellyfish washes ashore and they all fight about it. And if Kalon and Frog come, they’ll have some caretakers.”

There are other questions to ask, about what Valira wants and what decisions she’s made since she left them, but maybe the first few minutes of reunion aren’t the best time to ask them, so Phi takes off her own boots and grimaces her way into the sea. “And what makes a jellyfish such a delicacy?” she asks.

Behind her, Quil is sighing and hitching up her skirts, and Terry is sitting down in the sand, letting the three of them have a moment. Next to her, Valira laughs and lifts her face to the sun, and starts telling the story.

*

By unspoken agreement, they give Valira a day of grace. They trail her around the farm for the afternoon and evening, watching her ease with the sheep, the nets she and some of the youths haul in from traps with a day’s catch for them, the yarn they’re already beginning to spin. Within a year, their cloth will be prized, Phi knows, for having the properties of silk and wool all at once, mixed in with the prestige of having a legend. Within five, it will be the local village’s chief industry. Within a dozen, this part of the coast will be known for it.

“Gari will want to invest,” she says that night. “You or Kalon should talk to her about it.”

“I will,” Valira promises. “I’m not much of a businesswoman, but I want this farm to succeed, and I know that means money.” Quil and Terry are chatting on the other side of the hut where they’re all bunked down, which is warm but smells strongly of sheep, since it’s where the fleece is stored before it’s processed. The last Phi heard, he was trying to convince her to play cards and she was protesting that he would beat her every time. Valira tilts her head at them just a little. “All well there?”

“Trying to be,” says Phi, and wonders just how quickly Valira put together, months ago, that Quil’s surges come with strong emotion, and connected those surges to Phi and Terry.

Valira smiles at her. “Good,” she says, and raises her voice to draw the other two into the conversation, asking about how matters stood at Seath’s keep, and more importantly, at the hold.

It’s a late night and a pleasant one, the four of them sitting around the fire that Valira builds without asking Quil for help. With a proud smile, she offers them a blanket knitted from yarn that grows nicer from beginning to end. Phi can chart the progress from Valira alone with a drop spindle to a village’s worth of young women with spindles who have had much more time to practice, and doesn’t mind that it’s a small blanket that forces her to sit close to Terry, who invites Quil in close on his other side.

Phi is starting to be used to peaceful nights in her and Terry’s rooms, where they’ve started talking about building a cottage nearby but hesitate to plan too much when they might need to make space for three. After days of travel, though, it’s a welcome respite, and she’s glad for it, and for the reunion with Valira, who chatters away like she’s been saving up all her words for them but doesn’t seem like she’s blustering to hide something, just like she’s sharing her news.

They all fall asleep early, and follow Valira around for the morning too, as she feeds the sheep, sighs over one of them chasing a sparrow, and arbitrates a dispute over a washed-up octopus, a first-time delicacy the leader of the flock claims.

“She’s happy, I think,” says Quil when Valira apologizes and abandons them for an hour to help out in the too-crowded spinning hut, where they’re making their first attempts with the loom.

Phi sighs, because she hears the hope and the fear in Quil’s voice and feels them herself. If staying here will make Valira happy, she’ll accept it, but she doesn’t like to think of her so far away. “I think so too. But I trust her when she says she’s planning to come back, and at most split her time between the two.”

“I like the ocean,” says Terry. “I wouldn’t object to visiting, should we need to.”

“And within a year, even if it takes a little while to get here, we should be able to get back home quickly,” Phi dares, and is relieved to win a smile from Quil.

There’s a faint hint of ozone on the air, but Phi doesn’t know if she should attribute it to Quil missing Valira in advance or thinking of the home they’re all building, so she doesn’t say anything about it.

*

Phi can’t bring herself to have the conversation with Quil, but she can’t avoid all of her important conversations. That night, after an afternoon of helping Valira dig out some space next to one of the walls for another hut to go in, the four of them take a bottle of mead from the village out to the top of the bluff to sit on the edge, dangling their legs, and pass the drink back and forth down the line.

Once they’ve each had enough to warm them but not enough to make them maudlin, Phi cuts through the silence that’s been waiting for one of them to admit there’s a conversation they need to have. “Do you have an answer for yourself about Haoti yet? Or do you want to take me up on that promise to tell you my opinion?”

“Of course I have an answer. I have about three a day. But yes, I’d like your opinion.” Valira leans forward to give a glance to all of them. “Everyone’s opinion. You too, Terry. I know you didn’t know him, but I imagine you’d have something to say.”

“Then I’ll begin,” he says, amiable enough, though Phi can hear the hesitation behind it. “I suppose I don’t understand why you wouldn’t offer, at least. With that staff, it doesn’t cost you. You can leave the choice in his hands, and he’ll come back or he won’t.”

Valira takes a swig of the mead, a larger one than she has yet, and Phi wishes suddenly that they’d brought Kithri with them, with her never-ending flask and her sharp wisdom. Though then again, she might assume it was a question brought on by romantic flutterings, and not, ever and always, by Valira’s inability to believe she’ll ever make the right choice in a question of ethics. “That’s the problem,” she says at last. “Giving him the choice. _Forcing_ the choice. He was—I don’t know if you can understand without having met him, Terry, how tired he was. I don’t know if he would have gotten out of his bedroll most mornings if he hadn’t felt some kind of duty to us. If he’s finally resting, it seems unimaginably cruel to make him stop just to assuage my guilt.”

“Gari thinks you should do it,” Phi offers. “And she says there’s certainly room at the hold for another person raised to be a soldier without other options laid in front of them.”

“That’s good to know, but I want to know what you think.”

“I say yes, then,” says Terry. “Maybe, even if he says no, he’ll rest a little easier for knowing that you would have been willing, and that people are mourning him.”

For as many people as Phi has killed, there’s something sobering about being among the very small group thinking of giving a man back his life. She’s been thinking of her opinion, though it tends to dovetail with Gari’s, ever since Valira asked before she left. It still feels like a transgression to offer it. “If he could live without the burden of the succubus, or of Seath’s expectations, I think he’d be grateful for the chance,” she finally says.

Valira nods, absorbing that, and turns to Quil, who’s staring out to the night-dark sea with the fixed attention of someone trying not to look at her companions. “I know you don’t like him,” Valira says after a while. “Maybe you disagree, then?”

Quil twists to look at her, so Phi can’t see her face. “It doesn’t matter what I think of him. This isn’t about liking. It’s about … asking a question, I suppose. Wherever he is, after his death, whatever he’s doing, he knows you have that staff. Maybe he’s just been waiting for you to call for him. How much bother is a question, in the face of that? And—Valira, if he were in front of you right now, or if his ghost was, wouldn’t you want him to ask, instead of suffering?”

By the end of that, Quil’s voice is breaking a little, but Phi doesn’t dare to touch her to comfort her. Terry, from his dissatisfied noise, is wishing she weren’t between them. Valira, though, puts down the bottle and takes Quil’s hands. “He wouldn’t ever,” Valira says, rueful. “Even knowing it doesn’t cost me, I can’t imagine him asking me to spend the magic and the effort on him. He never even asked for healing when he was hurt. And this? It’s a bigger question for him to ask me then for me to ask him.”

“Then if he can’t ask, shouldn’t you?”

“Like she said,” says Terry, and Phi looks to find him watching Quil more than Valira, brows drawn together in a frown. “Is it such a bother to ask a question?”

He doesn’t mean Haoti. That’s obvious enough that probably even Valira knows it. Quil even looks over her shoulder at him, frowning right back, but a second later, she discards whatever she’s thinking to turn back to Valira. “You knew him better than the rest of us, I think. Would he really find the question that much of a bother?”

“Everything I asked him bothered him,” Valira shoots back, like she was waiting for the question. She tugs her hands gently from Quil’s and takes a drink from the bottle before passing it back down the line. “But I think he liked that I kept trying.”

There’s a decision in that sentence, and Phi takes the bottle when Quil passes it to her without taking a drink. Phi drinks herself and breaks the silence. “Well, then,” she says. “I think you have your answer.”

No one seems to have an answer to that. They all sit quietly, passing the bottle back and forth until it’s empty, and then Valira is the first one to stand up. “Come on,” she says, “the beach is even prettier at night, and I suspect I don’t have much longer here. We should enjoy it while we can.”

Valira and Quil walk ahead to the beach, stumbling down the steep path, and Phi stands up slower, eyes on Terry’s thoughtful expression as he gets up too. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking about questions,” he says. “And how maybe we’d both like her to ask, and that if she doesn’t want this, of course she won’t ask, and if she does—well, you heard her.”

“I don’t know how to ask,” Phi admits.

“Neither do I, but I’ll think about it,” he says, and takes her hand to follow them down to the beach.

*

In the morning, while they’re all still bleary from the drink, Valira crisply tells them that she thinks she can get the farm working independently within a week and asks them to excuse her. Before Phi can offer to help, she’s striding off, and collects her employees and most of the flock of sheep and seems to be teaching them the rudiments of understanding each other.

“We should explore,” says Terry, either because he believes it or because he can see how much Phi and Quil are at loose ends, so used to working in concert with Valira that it’s odd not to be even when they wouldn’t be any help. “I know we got the tour, but there’s always more to see, and maybe we can climb back over the wall, or go down to the beach.”

Phi smiles, relieved. “We can start on the beach, and see where we go from there.”

They’ve had plenty of days to relax at Fairpoint Hold, but there’s something wonderful about being away, just the three of them with Valira close to hand. There aren’t any brothers to interrupt, or work pulling anyone away, and there certainly aren’t any threats. Quil seems to enjoy the peace as well, and she smiles almost the whole time they stroll up and down the beach, picking up shells and sea glass to show each other, Terry pocketing a piece of blue glass the same color as Phi’s bracelet and stringing a shell with a hole in it on a lace to tie around Quil’s neck, which makes her catch her breath.

When the tide comes in, there isn’t much beach to sit on, so they retreat up the path to the top of the bluff. Phi, when neither Terry nor Quil seems inclined to lead them anywhere, walks along the top of the bluff until she reaches the wall, and then starts walking next to the wall, going around the perimeter like she might when assessing a battlefield.

Terry and Quil, though, don’t make it feel like a grim task. Quil, as she always does, attracts some curious bees, though they fly high enough that Phi wonders if Valira has had to lecture the sheep about eating insects. Terry keeps up a light conversation about the farm, and all the work Valira has done, trailing his hand across the wall as they go.

“I’m surprised she’s willing to leave so soon to resurrect Ewhoza,” he says when they’re nearly halfway down the wall, and there’s something in his tone, an extra weight that makes Phi look at him sharply. He shrugs, and doesn’t elaborate or retract.

“It’s Valira,” says Phi, wary. “Once she’s made a decision, she doesn’t tend to wait around. But if she says the farm will run, it will run.”

“I didn’t mean to imply otherwise.” He shrugs. “I’m looking forward to meeting him, though, if he says yes.”

Phi starts slowing their walk, because in another twenty yards, they’re going to be near enough to Valira and her group of students that they’ll be overheard, and she’s beginning to think this conversation should be private. There’s no reason for Terry to check with her if he’s found a way to ask the impossible question, when he knows she wants it too. Still, her stomach pitches at the thought, and she reaches out automatically for his hand, an anchor in whatever comes next.

“He’s not exactly the best of company,” says Quil, a little puzzled but maybe seeing from Phi’s expression that there’s more to his words than it seems. “But then again, maybe he’ll be better when he’s not fighting a losing battle with a succubus.”

“Do you think he’ll say yes, though?” Terry asks, and Phi pulls him to a stop. Quil, even more puzzled, stops with them. “That seems to be Valira’s worry, that he’ll say no.”

Quil frowns. “I think that whatever his flaws, if he knows Valira genuinely wants him alive again, he’ll come.”

With everything Phi knows about Ewhoza and everything Valira has told her about him, she’s fairly certain that’s the right answer, but it’s also not what Terry is looking for, she thinks. “I think so too,” she says, and then takes a breath. There will never be a better time than this. Valira is the only person here who knows them well enough to be well-meaning and nosy, if it goes badly, and if Quil needs space from them, she can stay on the farm when they leave, or she can go without all of Phi’s brothers asking her to stay. “You had a lot to say about asking questions.”

Quil looks back and forth between them, the frown growing deeper on her face. “Should I not have? It seemed … it seemed important to say.”

“It was,” says Terry. “I’ve been thinking about it. And thinking that maybe Valira isn’t the only one who should be brave enough to ask a question. Because if I’m right—Quil, is there a question you’d like to be asked?”

It’s the most delicate way to ask it, the way only Terry could manage, a way that will let her say no without turning them down entirely, and a question she almost certainly can’t misinterpret. At least Phi hopes so, and she keeps her eyes on Quil, waiting to see what she says, how she responds.

First, the frown melts into incomprehension, but that’s followed very quickly by realization, and then panic so sharp and obvious that Phi winces. “I don’t—I never meant to make it so obvious—” she says, fragmented, and then the world seems to waver, and the smell like lightning has hit the ground between them, and Quil leaps back just in time for a Fireball to erupt.

Phi, reaching out for her automatically, feels the heat on her arm, and Terry, standing a little closer to her, flinches back, but Quil, of course, is at the middle of it, leaving a ring of singed grass that thankfully doesn’t spread. When the flames die down, she’s standing with her arms wrapped around herself and a look of miserable resignation on her face.

“Are you hurt?” Phi asks, already stepping forward, only to stop when Quil retreats a little.

“Not too badly,” she says. “I should—I’ll go find Valira. And we can … we don’t need to talk about—I don’t want you to feel obligated to say something when I _know_ , I’ve been trying—”

“Quil,” says Phi, because Terry is wide-eyed, not used to the panic a Fireball brings for Quil, always the worst of any of her surges. “I don’t know what you think we’re saying, but I’m almost certain it’s not what we’re actually saying. If you want Valira, I’ll fetch her, but—can we sit down by the wall here? It’s stone. If there’s more fire, it won’t be hurt.”

“And now you’re being kind,” says Quil, on the edge of tears, but she doesn’t flinch back when Phi takes her hand to lead her to the wall.

_Do you need me?_ Valira asks in her head, a Message that means someone saw the flames and is worried.

Phi does her best to inspect Quil without letting on that it’s what she’s doing as she sits Quil down and then sits down next to her. She’s warm to the touch, and there are a few blisters on her arms along with soot, but she’s moving without pain. She’ll do well enough for a few minutes, and then they can treat her. _Give us a few minutes, but some healing in a bit wouldn’t go amiss._

There’s no response, but Valira is good at taking people at their word. Still, a moment later, Quil relaxes a little, and Phi has to assume that Valira came just close enough to cast Healing Word and give them their privacy while taking away Quil’s pain.

Phi concentrates on Quil as Terry comes to sit down against the wall too, so Quil is in between them and they have some chance of talking about this. Terry is still wide-eyed, disinclined to speak up again, so Phi gathers her courage and starts speaking. “It’s last night’s conversation that decided us,” she begins, knowing it’s almost what Terry said but that it’s still where they have to start. “Not just that it’s best to ask the questions, but that there are times when one person has to be the one to ask, because the other one has more to lose if the answer is no. We’ve been hesitating, like Valira has been hesitating, because we were frightened that you would say no, or worse, that you would say yes and not mean it.”

“Ask me what?” says Quil, and her voice is thin, but there’s intensity growing in her eyes as she looks between them.

Much as Phi wants to soften all of it with reassurances that they don’t expect anything, that they don’t want anyone hurt, couching the meat of the words is only going to hurt Quil more, in the end. “We love you.” It feels wrong to speak for Terry, but when she glances at him, he only smiles a little. “I love you. You’re my friend, but that’s not the only thing you are to me.”

“And now that I know you, it’s not the only thing I want you to be to me, either,” Terry says then. “And what we want to ask is if you want that too.”

Quil turns to Phi then, eyes wide, so confused and overwhelmed that Phi can’t even tell if she believes them. “You’re married. You said it so much, and I never wanted to get in the middle of that.”

“You never did,” Phi promises. “I love Terry. I’ll love him for the rest of my life. That doesn’t mean I can’t love you too. I’m not saying, if you choose to have a relationship with us, that everything will be easy, but my love for both of you isn’t in question here.”

Quil looks down at her lap then, fiddling with the loose threads at the edge of a singe mark on her skirt. “Is that what you’re offering? A relationship?”

“If that’s what you want,” says Terry. “We can’t see the future, but we’re serious about you. If you want to be with us, we want to plan on—everything, really. You don’t have to decide now, and we’d never keep you if you don’t want to stay, but that’s what we’d offer.”

“And if it’s not what you want, you’re still one of my best friends, and you still have a home at Fairpoint Hold.”

“Why wouldn’t I want it?” Quil says, and looks up at her. “How could I want anything else? But I can’t—I knew I loved you sometime on the voyage to the Boreal Valley, but I knew we couldn’t, because there was Terry, and I got to know him because I thought maybe if I really understood how perfect he was for you I could stop loving you, and it only made it worse.”

“Not sure if that’s flattering or not,” says Terry, a gentle joke, and Quil barks out a wild laugh that’s nearly a sob before pressing her hand over her mouth. He looks at Phi, and when she nods, puts his hand on Quil’s knee. “I’m sorry I’ve brought you so much pain—and I know you’ll tell me it’s not my fault, but I can still be sorry. But Phi is right. We love you. And we think you love us.”

Quil’s eyes go wide, and then she drops her head, hair falling forward to cover her face. “I was that obvious?”

“No. Cordelia and Valira both hinted,” says Phi, and suspects from the horrified little noise Quil makes that both of them are getting a lecture no matter the outcome of this conversation. “About your magic, and why the surges have been so bad, and so frequent. Which is why I’m saying—I love you no matter what your magic does, but I want you happy and safe. And I want you to be able to cast magic around us, because I know you love it. If that means you say no to us, I’ll understand.”

“I’d rather—I’d rather have you than magic,” says Quil, and looks up at her, and then at Terry. “Both of you. I don’t know what my magic will do. It escapes me, but mostly when I hurt. When I’m wanting something I can’t have. If I can have it … I can’t make promises. But maybe.” She puts her hand on Phi’s arm. “But you have to promise—if I hurt you, if I keep surging and leaving you in the path of Fireball or anything like that, you’ll let me go.”

Phi doesn’t know how to promise that, how to explain that Quil is free and Phi will never keep her if she doesn’t want them anymore, but that equally Phi isn’t going to let her retreat for things she can’t control, or indulge her instinct for self-sacrifice. Terry has the words, though, as he always seems to when they fail Phi. “We’re going to love you no matter what your magic does, as Phi said. We won’t throw ourselves into physical danger, step into the way of Fireballs or anything else, but we also know that you never want to hurt us. I’m not going to punish you for something you can’t control.”

“I’m not scared of you,” says Phi, because it’s true in the way she means it. She’s always afraid of loving people, because she knows it will mean loss, someday, but that’s not the kind of fear that would hurt Quil. “I never have been. You don’t trust yourself, but I trust you, and if time passes, and you trust that we won’t hurt you, and the surges keep coming, we’ll solve it. I’m sure Arfil will have an idea or two.”

“I want to try,” says Quil, sitting up straight and raising her chin, giving Phi a long look like she expects her to balk at the last second, and then one at Terry, maybe waiting for him to say he’s not ready. “I don’t think I’d forgive myself if I said no. But I don’t know what to do.”

Terry smiles, the charming one that always reminds her just what trouble he can get up to, especially if Lanra is around. “There’s something traditional, if you’ll allow me.”

Quil throws Phi a lightning-quick look, maybe wondering if she’ll object to the order of events, but whatever she sees on Phi’s face, she deems it not a problem, because she turns back with a nod, and Terry kisses her.

Phi knows Terry and the way he kisses her, and it’s strange and intimate to see the way he kisses Quil, different and still him all at once. His gentleness and sweetness and habit of smiling into a kiss at first, but a different rhythm, his hand in her hair instead of on her shoulder. When he pulls away, Quil’s breathing is shaky and she presses her hand to her mouth like she needs to confirm what just happened before she turns to Phi.

There’s a question in her eyes. Phi doesn’t make her ask it.

Up close enough to kiss, the smell of ozone clings to Quil like it’s part of her, just a faint hint in Phi’s nose that makes her wonder for a second if that’s what attracts Quil’s ever-present bees before their lips meet and she doesn’t have the attention to think of anything else, nothing but how to find the right angle, and then the sensation of having Quil close, kissing her, shifting until she can put an arm around Phi’s neck and draw her in even closer.

Sometime in the midst of it all, Terry’s familiar hand lands on Phi’s leg as he shifts in behind Quil, and Phi moves until she can squeeze his hand, so they’re all connected. After everything, after a year of horrors and months of readjusting, it’s a moment of perfect peace, and Phi stays in it as long as she can.

The moment is broken when Quil freezes and then when there’s a rush of air all around them. Terry gasps, next, and Phi pulls away just far enough to see what’s happened, not far enough to make Quil think she’s changing her mind.

Quil’s eyes are wide, and she’s already craning her neck to look around at the new shadows falling across them, and the source of the wind that must have been brought on by displaced air. Phi tilts her head too, until she can see the tops of the dozen stone pillars Quil has conjured out of the ground, each of them twice Phi’s height, one of them growing in the middle of Valira’s wall without disturbing it at all. They’re a loose ring around the three of them, it seems, not close enough together to trap them, but enough to draw a line between them and the rest of the world.

“That’s new,” Phi observes, as evenly as she can manage.

“We can never tell anyone about this,” Quil says at almost the same time. “Especially not Cordelia. Or Lanra.”

Terry is the first of them to start laughing, half in surprise and half in joy, but Quil succumbs to mirth a second later, and Phi catches it from them, until the three of them are twined in an ungainly group laughing in sheer relief. They can do this, and find a way through it, surges of wild magic or no.

“What are you three doing over there?” Valira calls from the distance, exasperated but willing to laugh if they let her in on the joke as she strides closer. “First fire, and now—how did you get a stone pillar through my wall? Quil, are you—ah.” That last comes when she gets close enough to see them properly through the maze of pillars around them, as she sees the way they’re all pressed together.

Phi has a moment’s guilty wondering if this will make Valira feel lonely, even more isolated and at loose ends than she was before. If it will, though, Valira’s hiding it better than she normally hides her emotions, and the grin that breaks across her face looks honest. “We’re fine, I think,” she says, sounding as responsible as she can manage with the laughter still leaking through her voice.

“Sorry,” says Quil, and for once, she doesn’t seem contrite at all, from the grin on her face. Phi gets to see her truly happy so rarely, and if this is what a few kisses and some reassurance will give her, Phi can look forward to a lot of time ahead of them of being happy. “I can … try to get rid of them?”

“They are a monument,” says Terry, hand pressed to his chest with mock offense.

Valira rolls her eyes and shakes her head at the three of them, and then looks over her shoulder, where the sheep are coming to inspect these new intrusions to their space. “You’re about to lose all your privacy, so if you want to escape, I’d do it now.” She smiles a little. “Out past the wall, if you go south a bit, there’s a nice patch of beach without sheep on it. You’d have some time.”

Phi is the first to scramble to her feet, but Quil is a second behind her, and only Terry’s continued laughter has him lagging a second behind. “We’ll see you later,” Phi promises. “I know you still have plenty to think about.”

“Not really, with the decision made,” says Valira, with a shrug and a smile. It’s probably a lie, but it’s one Phi’s got time to unpick. If she’s giving them the time to work out their last few questions, Phi isn’t going to question the gift. “Go on, I’ll get the sheep to come around to the new addition to their landscape if you’ll be back for dinner.”

“You couldn’t keep us away,” Quil promises, and she offers Phi her hand, and then Terry her other one when Phi takes it. She’s blushing enough for Phi to notice, and looking at Valira rather than either of them, but there’s no hesitation, either, and her grip on Phi’s hand is firm and warm.

“We’ll be back soon,” says Phi, and when Valira turns back in the direction of the sheep, she smiles at Quil. “But you’re going to have to let us go so we can get over the wall.”

“No, I’m not,” says Quil, and then there’s a rush of magic around all of them, a Dimension Door that can somehow carry two passengers.

The magic is steady, without a hint of ozone in the air, and Phi steps out on the other side of the wall. Terry and Quil are both smiling bright and unworried for once, and Phi smiles back, wondering how the start of happiness and peace can feel so much like the start of an adventure, and lets Quil start leading them down to the beach below.


End file.
